


Into the Black

by DustInTheWind



Category: Hunger Games Series - All Media Types, Hunger Games Trilogy - Suzanne Collins
Genre: Catoniss, F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-12-14
Updated: 2016-01-15
Packaged: 2018-05-06 15:20:59
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 14
Words: 42,915
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5422022
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/DustInTheWind/pseuds/DustInTheWind
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>In which Peeta doesn't make it out of the arena, but Cato does, and Katniss comes to the conclusion that if you wanna make an omelet, you gotta break some eggs.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Disclaimer: I own very little. And I certainly don't own The Hunger Games or any of the characters.
> 
> Warning: This is the Hunger Games, so there will be violence and rape/non-con. There will also be depression, self-harm, drug/alcohol abuse, mild sexual content, language, and maybe some suicidal ideation (not sure yet).
> 
> We're gonna gloss over the 74th games in this chapter, focusing only on the shit that really matters. Just assume that everything was pretty much the same as in the book, except for where I've changed it, obviously. The bulk of this story will take place after the 74th games. One key difference I'd like to point out is that the mid-game rule change is that one male and one female tribute can win. They don't necessarily have to be district partners.
> 
> Suggested listening for this chapter: Hurt by Nine Inch Nails (or Johnny Cash if you'd rather)

My my, hey hey

Rock and roll is here to stay.

It’s better to burn out than to fade away

My my, hey hey

 

Out of the blue and into the black

They give you this but you pay for that

And once you’re gone you can never come back

When you’re out of the blue and into the black

 

                                                                                        - _My my, hey hey (out of the blue)_ , Neil Young

 

There were 11,964 boys between the ages of 12 and 18 in District 2 not counting Cato Hadley. And on July 26th, 74 ADD, he volunteered to enter that year’s Hunger Games so that none of them would be reaped and slaughtered.

If he died, he would bring honor to his family with his sacrifice.

But he wasn’t going to die. He was going to win and bring glory to his District with his victory.

It was what he had been bred to do.

When he was five a nurse and a Peacekeeper came to his parents’ house. The nurse drew a vial of his blood and took a strand of his hair. Two days later the Peacekeeper returned, but this time he was with a man from the Academy instead of a nurse. They told Cato’s parents that his genes were promising and they were going to take him with them. His mother was so proud she had tears in her eyes.

Cato had spent more than 12 years preparing for this. He’d studied hours and hours of footage of past games so he knew which strategies worked and which didn’t. He’d trained in hand-to-hand combat and both close and long range weapons. He was an expert in survival skills in just about any environment imaginable. He even understood the sociological profile of the Capitolites and how to tap into it to gain sponsors.

A month before his reaping he was officially selected by the Academy to represent 2 in the 74th games, but it had been apparent for the last couple of years that he was the obvious choice. The girls in 2, they all knew it. They batted their lashes and spread their legs for him, each one hoping _she_ would be the one he would remember when he returned home a Victor.

After he had volunteered, as he and Clove watched the day’s reapings, he felt nothing but contempt for the other districts. Apart from 1 and 4, they were weak and cowardly, and they shrank in fear instead of protecting their own.

And then he saw the reaping from 12 and watched in disgust as that little rat volunteered. Suddenly it was all they could talk about. Claudius and Caesar, and even Seneca when they brought him on as a guest late in the afternoon.

Cato should have respected her for her bravery and her sacrifice.

But he hated her for undermining him.

\----------

The moment she saw him glaring at her after the Tribute Parade, Katniss Everdeen knew that Cato Hadley would play a pivotal role in her life, or, more likely, her death.

His eyes were full of ice, and when they landed on her she suddenly understood what her prey must have felt like back in the woods in 12. He had selected her and she knew it. The fear brought on by this knowledge made her shiver under her blankets at night.

In the mornings she would swallow that fear before she walked into the training room. She could not afford to let any of the tributes, and especially the brute from 2, see her sweat. She had to go home. She _had_ to. No matter what it took. For Prim.

As she looked around the training floor, she dreaded the thought of taking anyone’s life, but, for the most part, she thought she could do it. There were two exceptions. Two tributes who gave her pause. Two tributes she prayed she wouldn’t have to be the one to kill.

The first was the little girl from 11. Pure and ethereal, with eyes that broke Katniss’s heart.

The second was her district partner.

 _But Prim_ she reminded herself _. If it comes down to it, block out their faces and remember Prim._

But even as she steeled her spine, she felt guilt creep up along either side of it. Because she owed Peeta Mellark for the beating he had taken for her when she was 11. A beating he had taken to save her life and that of her family.

It would have been easier to dismiss the guilt if Peeta had brought up the incident with the bread. If he had pointed out that she owed him for what he had done that day. But no. Peeta--sweet, sweet Peeta--not only never said a word about the bread and the beating, he continued to try to save her life. He secured sponsorship for her by declaring his love for her on national television. He tried to keep the Careers away from her. He took a stab to the thigh from Cato for her.

When Claudius made the announcement that the remaining male and female tributes would be declared co-Victors, her heart leapt and she made the mistake of letting the walls surrounding it down and allowing hope to flood in.

She did not love Peeta Mellark, or at least not the way he loved her. But it would not have taken much more on his part for that to change.

\----------

After the tribute parade, Cato became obsessed with the idea of killing the Girl on Fire. He dreamed about it, fantasized about it, got hard at the thought of it.

There were a few times when the urge was especially unbearable. When he learned her score. When she dropped the tracker jacker nest on him. When she blew up his supply pile.

He would break each and every finger of hers, he decided, and then he would cut them off one by one. He’d snap her wrists with his bare hands and crush her ribs beneath his boots. He’d knock the teeth from her mouth and break her jaw. He would slice through her Achilles tendons with his knife. He would carve his name in her flesh with the tip of his sword.

And then he would drag her by her hair back to the camp and throw her on top of the fire. And when she was screaming and writhing and begging him for mercy and her skin was charred and black, he would pull her from the flames and squeeze every last ounce of air from her lungs.

\----------

There was one moment during the Games that made Katniss pause and wonder if there was more to Cato than met the eye. As she fled the feast at the Cornucopia, she could hear the despair and anguish in his voice as he cried out Clove’s name. And when she reached the safety of the trees, she turned to look back, just for a second, to find him on his elbows and knees beside Clove’s limp body, his head in his hands.

\----------

Weak as he was from blood loss, Peeta used every last ounce of his strength to hoist Katniss up onto the Cornucopia, but before he could join her, a mutt caught his pant leg and dragged him back down to the ground. She cried out for him, and as she scrambled desperately to turn around on her hands and knees to reach for him, she dropped her bow and it clattered against the steep metal side and onto the grass.

He was dead within sixty seconds, after the mutt that looked like Clove tore into his throat.

Cato stood at the far end of the Cornucopia, laughing like a madman as she clawed and screamed.

“Ladies and Gentlemen,” Claudius Templesmith announced. “We are pleased to present the Victors of the 74th Annual Hunger Games, Cato Hadley of District 2 and Katniss Everdeen of District 12.”

But neither of them accepted this arrangement.

They were both livid, seething, ready to explode.

She blamed him for Peeta’s death. For inflicting the wound that had slowed him down. He _did not_ deserve to live.

He had worked for this moment since the age of five. He had sweated and bled and ached for it. He _would not_ share his Victory with some rat from the lowest of the districts.

They wanted each other dead more than they’d ever wanted anything in their entire lives.

She was on her feet in a second and screaming like a wild animal and they were lunging for each other, both of them out for blood. His hands went around her throat and she clawed at his face and they rolled around on the cold metal roof of the Cornucopia, the contents of her quiver scattering everywhere. As he squeezed the air from her lungs, she reached out and her fingers found one bent arrow. She snatched it up and swiped at him, the tip of it catching him in the forehead. Blood ran down his face and stung his eyes and he could taste it in his mouth. She closed her eyes and dropped the arrow, her hands going to his wrists as she struggled in vain for oxygen.

And then the gamemakers activated the tranquilizers in their trackers and they both went limp.

\----------

Brutus was able to make his tribute understand that he had to simmer down and deal with the fact that his victory was a shared one.

Haymitch Abernathy was not as successful at subduing Katniss, and she was kept on a low dose of sedatives for the first few days following the games.

During their interview, Brutus and Haymitch were instructed to sit between them, while Peacekeepers hovered just offstage in the unlikely event that they attacked each other again like rabid dogs.

The Capitol audience loved the contrast of the two Victors, they way their personas served as perfect foils for one another. It was all very dramatic.

Caesar had been told it would be best not to ask them any questions about each other, and to discourage any interaction between the two of them at all.

Katniss stared straight ahead, refusing to acknowledge Cato’s existence. And for the most part, he did the same to her.

But when Caesar asked her about Peeta, she could see, from the corner of her eye, that he turned to look at her, a nasty smirk on his face.

And the Girl on Fire burned.

\----------

Cato returned to 2 triumphantly and moved into the mansion next door to Brutus’s in Victor’s Village.

He stood on his doorstep, grinning, arms outstretched, ready to receive all that victory promised him. Glory. Adoration. Riches. Leisure. 

But he quickly realized that something was wrong.

Colors were dull and sounds were muted. Sometimes he had to ask people to repeat what they’d said to him multiple times before he understood their words.

He did not sweat in the heat and he did not shiver in the cold.

He ate but the food tasted like sawdust. It stuck in his throat and sat like a lead ball in his stomach.

His mouth no longer salivated at the sight of the naked female form, and the first time he went to fuck a girl after his games he couldn't get it up. He got hold of a pill to help him with that problem the very next day, and he bent some girl over her couch and slammed into her, and it felt good when he came, but the high only lasted for a few seconds and when it was over, he felt empty in more than one way. Still, he continued to pick up random girl after random girl to give himself something to do.

And the nightmares. He saw the faces of those he had killed. He saw the fear in their eyes as they realized they were about to die at his hands. He tried to stop himself and change his course of action, but his mind had no control over his body, and he sliced off their heads and speared their intestines over and over again until he drowned in the blood he had spilt. And Clove. Always Clove. Staring at him with dead, black eyes and a bloody, sunken skull.  _You were too slow_ she said. 

He drank copious amounts of alcohol every night with the other boys he had trained with, and he grinned at them when they made lewd, douchebag comments and clapped him on the shoulder, but he found no humor in anything they said, and he rarely joined in the conversation. He was no longer the loud, wild drunk he had been before his games, but instead sat quietly and sipped on straight liquor as the world around him grew dimmer and fuzzier.

His hangovers were vicious and he said aloud that he would never drink again but really he welcomed them because he felt both alive and on death’s doorstep at the same time. His head pounded and his insides quaked and he dry-heaved over his toilet and he forgot, for the time being, about the things he had done.

On days he did not go out drinking, he wrapped a cord around his arm and injected himself with morphling and then he sat back in his bed and stared out the window for hours on end, pleasantly numb and lost in a fog where nothing mattered.

Some days he ran out of morphling and alcohol, and, too lethargic to leave the house to go get more, he would roll over and open his nightstand drawer and pull out a lighter. He’d hold the flame to his skin until the smell of burnt flesh assaulted his nostrils and his skin blistered up. And then he would smile up at the ceiling as the pain in his body drowned out the pain in his soul.

If he even had a soul.

He wasn’t so sure he did.

\----------

She went through the motions when she returned to 12. 

She moved into Victor's Village with her mother and Prim, and she went hunting with Gale on his day off from the coal mines.

Everyone adored her. They lauded her as a hero, a saint. She could do no wrong.

It made her want to scream and claw at her face.

Didn't they understand? She was no hero, she was no saint. She had murdered people. It didn't matter that they were Careers. They were still sons and daughters and brothers and sisters and friends and lovers. 

She had failed Rue. Although there wasn't much she could have done differently. In the end, if she'd been forced to, she probably would have killed the little girl so she could come home to Prim.

But she could have done everything differently with Peeta, who could have come home with her if she hadn't failed _him_. She could have let him climb up onto the Cornucopia first. She could have held onto her bow for dear life and shot down each and every mutt that came at him. She could have jumped down there herself and distracted them so that he could climb to safety. 

Didn't they understand? She would rather be dead like the other twenty-two, and resting in peace. But she couldn't kill herself because it would be a slap in the face to them.

And so she lived, and though she was even more sullen than she had been before the games, she went through the motions, day in and day out. And so no one realized anything was amiss. But at night, as she lay in her bed, she cursed whatever deity had allowed her to survive the games.

Didn't they understand? She deserved to be punished for the things that she had done and for the things that she had left undone. For the deaths of Marvel and Glimmer and Peeta and Rue. For her own survival.

But no punishment came. And so no relief came.

And then one night she realized that if they wouldn't punish her she could do it herself. She went to her closet and retrieved her hunting knife and she pressed the blade into the flesh of her upper arm.

And as the blood began to flow, she sighed with relief.

 

 


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Disclaimer: I do not own THG or any of the characters. In this chapter i used a couple of concepts pretty much word for word from the books (what Gale says after he kisses Katniss for the first time, Katniss's speech in 11, the quote about surviving the games rather than winning them), so I feel I should explicitly point out that they are not my work or ideas.
> 
> Warning: Violence, rape/non-con, depression, self-harm, alcohol/drug abuse, mild sexual content, language, suicidal ideation.
> 
> Thanks for reading and please comment!

Their tour was to begin in 12 and end in the Capitol, and so Brutus and Cato were to travel by train and meet Haymitch and Katniss at the Justice Center.

But they got there early, and Haymitch told them to just come over to his place to wait for Katniss to return to Victor's Village so they could rehearse their speeches.

She and Gale had gone out to hunt and check the traps as usual that morning, and when they had finished, they stood outside the back door of her house, and she was saying it wouldn't be long that she'd be gone, just a few weeks, really, and her mom and Prim would make sure his family had plenty to eat and-

He cut her off by taking her face in his hands and kissing her. She was shocked into returning it. Automatically. Like a reflex.

"I had to do that. At least once," he whispered, and then he left. Her insides were warm and her head was muddled, and she buried her face in the scarf around her neck for a few seconds as she tried to get herself together.

When she looked up it was straight into Cato's cold, unfeeling eyes.

"Well isn't that sweet. Two rats in love."

"Fuck off," she snapped, and then she turned on her heel and stalked into her house.

xxxxxxxxxx

Cato thought the place was fucking disgusting. Everything was covered in black dust. The streets, the houses, the branches of the trees. Even the people. He could see it in the creases of their foreheads and their knuckles.

"Does no one bathe here?" he asked loudly enough for her to hear. She scowled and stared straight ahead.

Brutus elbowed him in the ribs. "Shut up," he said through clenched teeth.

The people adored her but stared stonily at him. It didn't matter. He had been expecting a frosty reception in 12 anyway.

When it was time to go, Cato couldn't help but notice the tone she used as she left instructions for her mother. Her eyes were hard and her voice brusque and firm, as though she were the parent and her mother the child. "I mean it," she said. "Every day. You take Gale's family whatever they need. And Peeta's too." Her mother looked at her with wide eyes, intimidated by her own daughter, and nodded.

She turned to her sister and changed entirely, as though a switch had been flipped on inside of her. The gray of her eyes softened and turned smoky and her shoulders relaxed. Even the sharp angles of her face seemed to round out a bit. "Goodbye Little Duck," she said, her voice a caress now. "I'll see you in a few weeks." And then she hugged the girl tightly to her, kissing the top of her head with a dramatic "mmmmuuuahhh!"

She did not touch her mother.

And for the first time in months, Cato felt the tiniest stirring of curiosity about another human being.

That night, after she had gone to bed, he sat and flipped through the tv channels and pretended that he wasn't listening as Haymitch told Brutus her life story.

He pretended not to listen to how her dad had been killed in a mining accident when she was 11 and his body was never recovered.

He pretended not to listen to how her mother had basically gone catatonic and she had been forced first to sell off most of what they owned, and then to dig through trash to feed herself and her little sister and her mother.

He pretended not to listen to how she almost starved to death until one day she remembered that her father had taught her about edible plants and how to hunt with a bow and arrow and that he'd left a couple of them hidden in the woods.

He pretended not to listen to how she'd risked her life every day for years, sliding under the fence and out into the woods until eventually she became known for her hunting prowess and her ability to provide for her family.

But he heard every word.

xxxxxxxxxx

Their mentors and escorts had decided that, due to the likelihood of Katniss breaking down, Cato should read the entire speech in 11.

But she was disgusted by the way he read the words right off of the paper without lifting his eyes to the crowd. Flatly, monotonously, as though he was bored as hell. Which he probably was.

And when she looked at Rue's family, she couldn't stop the words of gratitude and respect that tumbled from her mouth.

She started to wonder if her spontaneous outpouring had been a mistake as soon as the old man whistled those four notes.

She got a bad feeling that it had been when the entire crowd lifted their hands and gave her the District 12 salute.

She knew for certain that it was when the Peacekeepers dragged the old man who had whistled to the front of the crowd and shot him, execution-style, in the head.

She screamed and sobbed and Haymitch had to pick her up in his arms like a child and carry her inside.

She covered her thighs and stomach with cuts that night. But she could not bleed enough.

So after everyone had gone to bed, she snuck out of her room and over to the wet bar, and she filled a glass all the way up to the top with liquor, and when she returned to her room, she chugged it as fast as she could, ignoring the way it burned as it slid down her throat. And then she curled up into a ball on her bed and waited for it to kick in and usher her into oblivion.

xxxxxxxxxx

He had figured 11 would be at least as frosty towards him as 12 had been, since Thresh had met a particularly gruesome end at his hands.

But something was different. It didn't feel cold and stony like 12. They loved  _her_ , of course. But there was a current of energy, a dangerous one, running through the crowd. Cato could feel its subtle vibrations on his skin, raising the hair on his arms and the back of his neck. He could hear it crackling in the air.

If he had spit into the wind in 12, he imagined it would have frozen into a crystal of ice before dropping to the ground to shatter.

If he spit into the wind here, it would sizzle and steam and evaporate before it ever hit the ground.

A feeling of apprehension skittered up his spine, and without realizing he was doing it, he avoided making eye contact with anyone in the crowd, and focused instead on maintaining a neutral expression and getting through the speech as quickly as possible.

Everything would have been fine if Firegirl hadn't opened her  _stupid fucking mouth_  and poured out all of her disgusting feelings and some shit about respect and gratitude and Thresh playing the game on his own terms and Rue reminding her of her sister.

And then they shot that foolish old man.

In the brief commotion that followed Cato accidentally looked right into the eyes of Thresh's older sister.

At the Academy and in the arena, he had coated himself in a numbing agent concocted from adrenaline and the promise of glory and years of training in the art of dehumanization until he had become completely desensitized to blood and fear and cries for mercy.

But he was not at the Academy and he was not in the arena, and he had not had time to don his emotional armor. And so he was not prepared for what he saw in her big brown eyes. The pain in them was too raw and too deep for words, and for the first time he understood,  _truly understood_ , the inhumanity of the things that he had done in his games.

It was too much, it was overwhelming, and as quickly as he could he retreated into himself and emerged wrapped in his sociopathic security blanket. It provided relief in the short-term, and he bitched at Katniss ("Way to go Girl on Fire.") as she folded in on herself and sobbed, but the damage was done. The pain he had seen in Thresh's sister's eyes slithered under his skin and seeped into his blood and lodged itself into his bones to lay there, dormant, like the spawn of a parasite, waiting to hatch into full-fledged guilt.

That night, in the privacy of his room, he shot himself up with morphling and drank half of a bottle of whiskey. He woke up the next morning facedown on the floor in a puddle of his own vomit, and as he pushed himself up onto his hands and knees, he lamented the fact that he hadn't passed out on his back and choked to death on it.

xxxxxxxxxx

At breakfast he listened to Haymitch and Brutus shoot the shit together like two old friends.

"You're awfully friendly with that scum," he observed after Haymitch had left the table.

"Scum?" Brutus laughed and crossed his arms over his chest. "I used to think like that. Just like that. But then I realized it. And you'll realize it too. Soon enough."

"What the fuck are you talking about?"

"The other Victors. They're your family now son. They understand you better than anyone else. And you understand them. You just don't realize it yet."

xxxxxxxxxx

Every night when she came back to the train, she drank straight whiskey, just like Brutus and Haymitch and Cato, until her head lolled on her chest, and Effie exclaimed at how often the decanter had to be refilled.

She would stumble into her room and pass out on top of the covers, but toward dawn Rue and Marvel and Peeta and Glimmer would come to pay her a visit and she would wake, screaming and shaking, until Haymitch rushed in to hold her against his chest and rock her back and forth.

She never heard Cato cry out in his sleep. It figured. He probably didn't feel an ounce of guilt for the lives he'd taken.

At breakfast, she would choose simple foods. Fresh bread, full of raisins and nuts, that reminded her of the loaves Peeta had tossed to her five and a half years ago. She would tear off chunks and dip them into her hot chocolate, just like he used to.

"You eat like a child," Cato said scornfully as he feasted on eggs benedict with crab and exotic fruit salad and asparagus out of season. "All of this," he gestured around the table, "and you choose that."

"And does  _that_  make you happy?" she asked, her voice low and scathing. Because some part of her innately understood that he was dying on the inside, just like she was. "Does any of this shit," she gestured around to the velvet upholstery and the crystal chandeliers, "make you happy?"

He glared at her and returned to his breakfast, disturbed at the unfamiliar sensation of having someone see right through him.

xxxxxxxxxx

They were in 5 when he decided he'd had enough. They  _adored_ her. They chanted her name and they threw flowers at her and their applause for her was thunderous.

They clapped for him too, but there was something sarcastic about it, sullen about it, grudging about it. Like one child forced to apologize to another. They did not cheer. And they certainly did not throw flowers at him.

This was not what he had worked for his whole life. This was not what he had envisioned. Maybe that was why he was so unhappy. Because his victory had been robbed from him. By that cunt from 12.

"This is  _her_  fault," he growled to Brutus. "And fucking Seneca Crane's. Why I can't enjoy my Victory. Why the people of these pathetic districts hate me."

Brutus snorted and took a sip of whiskey. "No it's not. They'd hate you anyway. Even if you were the only Victor. Do you think they didn't hate me when I went on my tour? Do you think they didn't hate Enobaria? And do you think any of us enjoy our victories?"

Cato turned to look at his mentor, and realized, for the first time, that he was a high-functioning alcoholic. He saw, for the first time, the emptiness in his eyes. He heard, for the first time, the hollowness in his voice.

"You never told me that," he said slowly. 'You made it sound like the best feeling in the world. You lied to me."

Brutus shrugged. "There would have no point in telling you the truth. Look, I'm sorry to have to break it to you, but no one wins the games son. 23 people die and 1 survives. Well, in this case, 22 people died and 2 survived." He lifted his glass to his mouth again but paused. "If you can even call it survival. Your body survives, let's put it that way. Your soul though...now that's a whole nother story. That's long gone I'm afraid." He clucked his tongue and took a sip.

Cato sat there in shock, absorbing Brutus's words, and realizing the truth in them.

His whole life. His  _whole life_  he had worked for this. And  _this_  was his reward?!

They had made false promises on honeyed tongues.

President Snow. The gamemakers. Brutus. Enobaria. Lyme. All of them.

He'd been manipulated and used for entertainment. He had been nothing more than a puppet. He had laughed with contempt at the tributes from the other districts. So proud he had been. So proud that he wasn't pathetic like them. But he was the pathetic one.

It started as a slow burn, but it gained momentum the longer he sat there until, twenty minutes later, he stood up so abruptly that his chair clattered to the floor behind him. He lunged at Brutus, knocking the glass from his hand, grabbing him up off of the couch by the fabric of his shirt. "YOU LIED TO ME! YOU FUCKING LIED! YOU USED ME!"

And then he punched Brutus right in the mouth. Brutus punched back.

The Peacekeepers tried to stay out of it and let it run its course, but when the two victors broke the glass coffee table and got blood all over the carpet, they stepped in. Brutus pulled back immediately, but they had to threaten Cato with a tranq gun.

"Fine," he snapped at them, heaving for breath and spitting blood out onto the carpet. "Fine, I'll stop." He glared at Brutus. "You're dead to me."

Brutus waited for the Peacekeepers to leave and then he eyed Cato mournfully as he wiped the blood from his nose with the back of his hand. "I didn't have any other choice Cato. None of us do. If it hadn't been you then it would have been another. It wasn't personal. It never was. Not with me or Enobaria or Lyme or you. We're victims of circumstance. Victims of our own genes. What can we do?"

But Cato didn't want to hear it. He didn't want to be consoled. He turned to go to his room, and there in the hallway was that little bitch, studying him with a mixture of curiosity and pity.

It infuriated him.

She stepped out of his way but he turned and pushed her none too gently into the wall. "Get the fuck outta my way," he said through clenched teeth, getting in her face, waiting for her to flinch or show some other sign of fear.

But she didn't flinch and she didn't show any other sign of fear. She just continued to look up at him with that same expression, her eyes silver and shifting in the light from the sconces.

"You better wipe that fucking look off your face or I'll do it for you." But even he could hear how half-hearted he sounded by now. Like the tail end of a thunderstorm.

She looked at him for a few more seconds, calm as could be, and then she turned, slowly, and made her way back down the hall and into her room, her steps light and graceful as a hunter's.

He bowed his head and exhaled as he unclenched his fists.

xxxxxxxxxx

A week later they were in 2, and a visit to the Academy was on the docket.

The youngest children, the six and seven year olds, crowded around Cato, staring up in wonder and touching his muscles. He smiled down at them mechanically, but Katniss could tell that the part of him that would have reveled in this a week ago was dead and gone. He was now wholly disillusioned.

And then a gaggle of little girls crowded around her, trying to press in and touch her clothing and her hair. They gazed up at her in admiration.

"I wanna be a victor just like you some day," a tiny thing with big blue eyes said to her.

She wanted to cry.

She was equally disturbed as she watched the class of ten-year-old boys gang up on the poor soul who had come in last in their wrestling tournament that day. They stole his afternoon snack and tripped him and called him awful names. Names that ten-year-old boys should not know.

One of the instructors, a man named Marcus, noticed her expression and came over to comfort her. "Don't worry about that. You know Cato was the runt of his group until he was about that age. They were merciless to him. Every day for years. And look at him now." He grinned and patted her on the back.

Katniss swung her head around to give him a look. " _Seriously_?" she ground out. "Jesus christ, no wonder."

"No wonder what?"

"Nothing," she sighed.  _No wonder he is the way he is_.

xxxxxxxxxx

Her glass was empty. And she was still conscious. This was unacceptable.

When she left her room to refill it, Cato was sitting on the couch with his back to her.

He was watching the footage of Clove's death. Over and over. He would pause, rewind, start up again. Pause, rewind, start up again. Pause, rewind, start up again.

She couldn't hear the words he was muttering, but she could tell by the way he held his head in his hands that he was verbally flogging himself for not being fast enough, for not being in the right place at the right time.

She understood, far too well, what it felt like to drown in guilt over the death of your district partner. To analyze your every move and what went wrong and what you could have done differently-what you  _should_ have done differently-to ensure that they had lived.

She made her way to the bar, and when he heard her his head shot up and he paused the tv. "What the fuck are you doing?" he snapped.

She didn't answer, she just picked up the whiskey decanter and refilled her glass. And then she reached up and took down another glass and she filled that one too.

She came to stand in front of him, and she held it out. He eyed her warily, but he took it.

"To failing our district partners and hating ourselves for it," she said in a low voice, as she touched the rim of her glass to the rim of his.

He looked up at her.

She looked down at him.

And together they partook in unholy communion.


	3. Chapter 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Disclaimer: I don't own THG or any of the characters.
> 
> Warnings: Violence, rape/non-con, drug/alcohol abuse, depression, self-harm, suicidal ideation, mild sexual content, language.
> 
> I'm sorry for the short chapter. I wanted to flesh it out more, but everything I wrote felt like filler so I scrapped it. The next chapter will be longer for sure.

The President gathered together with his advisors and gamemakers for a cabinet meeting the morning the victors were due to return to the Capitol for the close of the tour.

“Sir,” Seneca Crane said when the meeting was almost finished, “we had one more topic we wanted to bring up to you. We know you’re starting to get bids for Miss Everdeen, but...we think it would be best if we wait to start her for a couple of years. Until her popularity with the districts dies down at least. She’s only 16 and if they find out…” But he didn’t need to finish his statement. “In the meantime, we can use the opportunity to drive the price up for her, to make her even more desirable. The whole ‘good things come to those who wait’ idea.”

President Snow narrowed his eyes, clearly unhappy with the situation. But then he sighed in resignation. “Fine. And Cato?”

Seneca waved a hand dismissively. “Oh, he’s fair game. No one will riot at the sale of _his_ body.”

xxxxxxxxxx

No one had told Cato that, in the Capitol, the word victor was synonymous with prostitute. At least if you were good-looking. Which Cato was. Very, in fact.

Finnick approached him at the President's closing banquet to warn him, but Cato laughed in his face. “Maybe they made _you_ their whore, but they won’t do it to me,” he scoffed.

The comment should have offended Finnick, but he just sighed and looked like he felt sorry for Cato. “Your parents,” he said. “I saw the interviews. You’re not close to them, but do you care about them?”

Cato could not for the life of him fathom why this pretty boy was asking him about his parents. “None of your fucking business.”

But Finnich was unfazed. “I had parents once. Before I told Snow I wouldn’t be the Capitol’s whore. You may have read about their deaths. Or maybe you haven’t. It was a fire. A terrible one.” And then he left.

Cato didn’t know if Finnick was telling the truth. But he knew one thing. He didn’t want to find out the answer the hard way.

And so when the time came, he did as they told him.

It wasn’t that he minded the actual act or even the people he was doing it with. For the most part they were rich Capitol women in their 30s and 40s who had had a _lot_ of plastic surgery. If any of them had hit on him he would have had sex with them anyway.

It was the point. That they had told him he had to. That he was powerless. That he had no control, and therefore had no dignity.

His resentment toward the Capitol, which had been conceived somewhere in District 5, began to grow rapidly, until it gnawed at his insides, another parasite to join the guilt with which Thresh’s sister had impregnated him.

And then, one night, at one of the numerous parties the victors were forced to return to the Capitol for, he turned to see a lecherous old man leering at the Girl on Fire, and running his hand down her back. She made a face and edged away from him.

Jesus. He’d forgotten about her. God knew who was paying for her and what she was being forced to do.

The thought made Cato want to vomit.

And he wished more than ever that he had managed to strangle her to death on top of the Cornucopia.

xxxxxxxxxx

Everyone knew that Seneca Crane occasionally indulged in a little morphling.

Still, the entire Capitol was shocked to learn that he had died of an accidental overdose a few weeks after the tour concluded.

Well, almost the entire Capitol.

The red-headed Avox girl who had roofied Seneca Crane and then injected him with a lethal dose of the opiate was not at all surprised.

Neither was Plutarch Heavensbee, who had procured said lethal dose and handed it off to her in a dark hallway.

But he acted shocked when President Snow called him to appoint him as the new head gamemaker.

xxxxxxxxxx

They happened to be at the bar at the same time, getting their glasses refilled, when Katniss noticed it.

He had loosened his tie and rolled the cuffs of his shirt up in that way that made all of the women (except for her of course) swoon. One of the cuffs had ridden a little too far up and there on his forearm was a perfect ring of shiny, pink flesh. As though a week or so ago he had taken a lighter and run it from the underside of his forearm, up the side, over the top, and back down to his starting point, which, in fact, was exactly what he had done.

“Why do you do it?” she asked.

“What?”

“That,” she motioned her head toward his forearm. “Burn yourself.”

He looked panicked, but just for a second, and then he shrugged. “It was an accident.”

“An accident?” Her tone was skeptical.

“Yeah. Cooking.” He tugged his sleeve down.

“Somehow I doubt that. I think it’s probably as much of an accident as this,” and she looked down and poked her knee out so that the soft skin on the inside of her thigh, laced methodically with straight, perfect little cuts, flashed into view.

“How’d you get those?” he asked stupidly, though he already knew the answer.

“Cooking.” She adjusted her leg to conceal her cuts again. “So why do you do it?” she asked again.

“I don’t know. Why do _you_ do it?”

She fixed her gaze over his shoulder, staring off at nothing. “Because I have to pay for what I did in the arena. And no one will make me.”

The bartender returned with their drinks. She picked hers up and pivoted to walk away.

“It makes me forget about the games,” he said softly to her back. “It gives me something else to concentrate on.”

She turned back around to face him.

He touched the rim of his glass to the rim of hers.

She looked up at him.

He looked down at her.

And, for the second time, together they partook in unholy communion.


	4. Chapter 4

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Disclaimer: I don't own THG or any of the characters.
> 
> Warnings: violence, rape/non-con, depression, self-harm, suicidal ideation, drug/alcohol abuse, mild sexual content, language
> 
> I promised a longer chapter and here you are. Let me know what you think and thanks for reading!

She felt sick in District 12. They wanted her to be who she had always been, and so she tried her hardest, but her insides were churning and she was having a hard time keeping food down.

She felt pressure building up in her, and her bloodletting was becoming less and less effective, the relief short-lived and less potent than before.

Her jaw ached from being clenched for so long and so hard, and everyday she wondered if this would be the day when she would finally crack from the strain of it all.

It was the worst with Gale, who looked down at her the way children look up at the stars in the sky. It was too much. Didn't he understand? She couldn't live up to who he thought she was. She was no good for him, she was no good for  _anyone_. She didn't love him the way he loved her, the way he wanted her to love him.

It wasn't that she didn't want to, because some part of her did. It was that she couldn't. She had nothing to give, she'd been stripped and drained.

She didn't fit in anymore, she didn't belong here anymore, but none of them knew it. None of them except Haymitch, and the two of them would never speak it aloud.

She was almost relieved- _almost_ -when the summons arrived. President Snow's granddaughter was turning ten and there was to be a week of celebratory events in the Capitol. Carnivals, fireworks, parades and parties. Even a stupid fancy dress ball on the last day where the men were supposed to wear tuxes and the women tiaras. And of course, Snow's little princess and all of her friends wanted the Victors-Panem's biggest celebrities-at every event.

xxxxxxxxxx

He saw a kitchen knife and he thought about slitting his own throat.

He saw a bottle of pills and he thought about swallowing a handful and chasing it with a handle of whiskey.

He saw a length of rope and he thought about wrapping it around his neck and hanging himself.

He saw a bridge and he thought about jumping off of it headfirst.

He saw a train and he thought about jumping in front of it.

He saw a Peacekeeper and he thought about assaulting the man just so they would shoot him.

He saw a pair of cement blocks and he thought about tying one to each foot and jumping into the river.

He saw his sword and he thought about running himself through with it.

He saw a can of gasoline and he thought about dousing himself and lighting a match.

And every day something would pull him back out of it. One of his buddies from his training days, calling out to him from across the room. A baby crying in its mother's arms. A sudden gust of wind. A stray dog barking at a cat in a window. A clap of thunder overhead.

But everyday he wondered if this would finally be the day when he would crack from the strain of it all.

xxxxxxxxxx

Katniss had no idea why Plutarch Heavensbee had invited himself to lunch in her hotel suite the very day she arrived in the Capitol, but the last thing she had expected was for him to tell her over chicken piccata and Pinot Grigio that District 13 still existed in the form of a network of massive underground bunkers.

"They're planning a rebellion," he said, once she'd gotten over her initial shock, "and the people of the districts are antsy. They don't know about 13, but if the conditions are right, they'll rebel too. They already did in 11. Oh yes," he said when he saw the look of disbelief on Katniss's face. "When you saluted that little girl. It took the Peacekeepers hours to subdue them. I'm sure you felt the tension while you were there on tour." And he pulled out a holo and brought up a 3D video of the footage from the riot in 11.

"I never heard about that," she said, and she watched, riveted, as the people of 11 set fire to buildings and attacked Peacekeepers and broke into grain silos and hung their mayor from the balcony of his mansion. "I thought he died of a heart attack!"

"Well that's what they told you. And of course you didn't hear about the riot. No one did. The President can't have the other districts knowing about that. Getting brave and copying it. But this very riot," he said as he shut down the holo, "is the reason you are still alive my dear. It's the reason that the rule allowing one male and one female to survive was instated in the middle of your games. To give the other districts hope. To calm them down. And I'm telling you, they are ready and poised. They're covered in kerosene. They just need one spark to light them all at once. And if I play my cards right, I think I can arrange for the Third Quarter Quell to be that spark."

Katniss swallowed her annoyance at the fire metaphor and focused on the more troubling aspect of his words. "You sound as though you're rooting for rebellion."

"You're a quick one."

"Is this some kind of a trick?" she asked.

"No."

"Then just say whatever you have to say."

"If all of the districts rebel at once, the Peacekeepers will be stretched thin," Plutarch said. "They'll have to leave the Capitol understaffed and therefore extremely vulnerable. It's the perfect time for 13 and the rebels to attack and take over. But as you know, communication between districts is...well, there's no other way to put it...nonexistent. So in order to get them to rebel all at once, we need to harness something they have in common. And that thing is the games."

"I was under the impression that the games divided us against one another."

"They do. Most of the time. But they can also unify. You've caused that yourself. The atrocity of that little girl's death and the compassion and sorrow you displayed for her was enough to rile 11 up. You're the most popular victor ever with the outlying districts. You're their saint, their hero. They don't want to see you make it out of one arena just to suffer all over again in the quell."

Katniss should have been terrified by that last statement, but she was long past the point where physical pain or the thought of her own death scared her, and she was more confused than anything. "All over again? You can't do that."

"I can if the tributes from the Third Quarter Quell are reaped solely from a pool of former Victors."

She was genuinely curious. "Why would you do that?"

"Haven't you been listening? To rile the people up. They'll flip out if the Girl on Fire is reaped and forced to endure horrific conditions again."

"But the other Victors-"

"Are already committed to the cause. Or at least most of them are."

"How? Why would they agree to it?"

"Look at them. Drunks, morphling addicts, depressives, unwilling prostitutes. They all hate the Capitol my dear. And most of them have nothing left to lose. Now if you'll excuse me," he said, and flashed her his watch.

And that was when she saw it. The faint outline of a mockingjay on the face of the timepiece.

"I'm late for another appointment," he continued. "I'll come see you again Sunday evening, and I'll share the details of my plan with you then."

xxxxxxxxxx

That first evening there was a cocktail party for the adult guests, and all of the Victors were required to be present. Though Katniss knew all of them by face and name, and had met most of them by this point, she was startled at how many seemed to purposely seek her out that evening, if only briefly.

The first to do so was Finnick Odair, the Capitol playboy. "Well, isn't this a lovely dress," he said, reaching out to tug on the fabric of her gown. As he did so, a thin leather cord, wrapped around his wrist, peeked out from under his sleeve. Affixed to it was a pin that looked exactly like the one that Madge had given her. Finnick retracted his hand, shook his sleeve back down, and winked at her. Then he turned and walked away.

By the time the fourth victor approached her, she started to look for the symbol automatically. Some wore the same bracelet as Finnick, hidden under their sleeves. Some wore the mockingjay as a pendant, tucked safely beneath their collars until they bent just so to allow it to flash into view.

Even Gloss and Cashmere, the brother and sister from 1, approached her.

But the one that really shocked her was Enobaria, from 2. "Mint?" she asked, holding out a small, open tin in offering. She grinned, baring her fangs, and Katniss, unnerved, automatically reached out to take one. And there on the little white puck was a red mockingjay.

At the end of the night, she tallied it up mentally. A male and female victor from almost every district had flashed the mockingjay at her in some shape or form. There were two exceptions. The first was Haymitch, the only living male victor from 12, who had not shown any type of badge of allegiance to her. But the twinkle in his eye as he watched victor after victor approach her told he knew exactly what was going on.

The second exception was the District 2 men. Not one of them paid any attention to her that evening.

xxxxxxxxxx

"So tell me the details," she said without preamble when Plutarch returned to visit her as promised.

"These games will be full of atrocities. Brother against sister. Old friends against one another. Especially cruel deaths at the hands of the Capitol. The Girl on Fire brought to her knees."

"Brought to my knees?"

"Yes. I'm warning you my dear, if you agree to this, it will not be fun for you."

"How exactly do you intend to bring me to my knees?"

"Well I was hoping to get Cato Hadley to agree to do it for me. He's the last person I need to speak with, but he's crucial. The interaction between the two of you is the lynchpin to this whole thing. The Capitol may love him, but the people hate him. The possibility of his victory and your death at his hands...it just may be enough to get all of the other districts-besides 2 of course-up in arms."

"Oh I'm sure he'll agree. You don't even have to let him know about your plan. He'll be happy to have any excuse to kill me."

"I'm not so sure about that. Have you looked at him recently? I mean  _really_  looked at him? The games have taken their toll on him, just as they have on you. He's no fan of the Capitol. And like many of the others, he has almost nothing to lose."

"He has family doesn't he? Parents?"

Plutarch waved his hand dismissively. "I have ways of ensuring their safety."

"Do you? Because, you know  _I_  have quite a lot to lose."

"I know." Plutarch wiped his mouth with his napkin and took a sip of wine. "Your mother, your sister. The Hawthorne family. I can assure their safety."

"How?"

"You'd be surprised by how many of the Peacekeepers share my mindset. And I can make sure that they're the ones who 'arrest' your loved ones when the time comes. They'll be incarcerated in District 13, of course."

And then he proceeded to map out exactly what he had planned for her. "Will you do it?" he asked when he was finished.

"Do I really have a choice?"

"Yes. I haven't told President Snow my idea for the quell yet. If you refuse, we'll do something other than reaping the victors. And I'll have to come up with another way to stir things up in the districts."

"When do you need your answer by?" she asked as he stood up to take his leave.

"There's no set date. But this will take a lot of coordination. A lot of preparation. So ideally, in the next couple of weeks. If we're going to do it we need to get started."

"I'll give you my answer tomorrow."

He nodded and bent down to kiss her hand.

"Plutarch?" she asked when he had almost reached the door.

"Yes?"

"I know about Cato. What they make him do. Like they do with Finnick and Gloss and Cashmere. I heard the rumors. But..why don't I have to do it?"

"We advised the President against it. At least for a couple of years. We're afraid it could set off riots."

"I thought that was what you wanted."

"I do. But I want all of the districts to go up within a very short period of time-a few days. Not sporadically, and not just  _some_  of them, which is what would likely happen if you were sold as a prostitute. It's too easy to subdue them if only a couple of them rebel at a time."

"Well won't they rebel before the games start if I'm reaped?"

"Maybe. Maybe some of them will. But we'll be able to get the rest of them to go up within a few days, so that's fine. 12 won't go right away if you're reaped. They'll be too afraid that the President will make the arena hell for you in revenge for their disobedience. But I'll have my Peacekeepers ready to go anyway. In case they need to remove your family and friends earlier than originally planned."

He turned back to the door.

"Cato's just as much of a victim as me, isn't he?" she asked softly. "He's just as much of a victim as the other twenty-two who died in our games."

Plutarch pivoted to give her one last look. "In a way, yes." And then he was gone.

She sat at the table after he left, thinking over the choice that had been laid at her feet.

There was a part of her that still wondered if this was all some elaborate trick to set her up and then arrest her for treason. But that didn't make any sense. All she was agreeing to do was go back into the arena and there was nothing treasonous about that. And they could make her do it anyway if they really wanted. So no, she decided. This wasn't a trick.

She closed her eyes and weighed her two options.

She could say no, no thank you. And then life would continue on for her (if she could even call it life, this endless stream of days, bleak and full of pain) until one day she would be nothing more than a ghost.

Or she could say yes, I will. And it would not be fun at all. It would be awful, in fact. But it would not last long. And no more Rues would be reaped. No more Prims. People would suffer and die in the ensuing rebellion and war, it was true. But she had seen enough in her sixteen-almost seventeen-years on earth to know that people were already suffering and dying at the hands of their government.

And so she chose the second option.

Because she would rather see a child shot to death by a peacekeeper than watch them slowly starve.

As for herself. Well. It would be better to burn out than to fade away.

xxxxxxxxxx

Plutarch invited Cato over for dinner the very next day, right after he received his answer from Katniss.

Cato didn't really want to go, but by this time he'd learned  _invited_  really meant  _commanded_ , and so, resentfully, he showed up.

He listened in shock as, over lobster and filet mignon, Plutarch talked about the existence of District 13 and the rebellion and his plan for the Third Quarter Quell.

"You want me to  _what_?" he sputtered when Plutarch asked for his help and provided explicit details of the role he had in mind for Cato to play.

"You heard me."

"Absolutely not." Cato threw his napkin onto the table and rose from his chair. "I'm done being the Capitol's monster."

"That's not what I'm asking you to do."

"It sure sounds like you are. And have you asked  _her_  what she thinks of your little plan?"

"Yes, I have. And she's agreed to it. She's willing to sacrifice herself to put an end to the games. To ensure that no more innocent little girls like her sister or that poor thing from 11 are ever reaped."

"How do I know you're not lying?"

Plutarch shrugged. "Ask her yourself. Tonight. At the ball."

"No. If I'm reaped then I'm reaped. So be it. I'll go in there again. And I hope you're able to accomplish what you're trying to do. I really do. I would love to see our bastard president tortured and maimed. But I won't do what you're asking of me."

And then he strode from the room.

xxxxxxxxxx

"You look stupid in that tiara," he said when he saw her that night. Because she did. It did not suit her at all.

"And you look stupid in that bowtie."

"I know," he agreed, edging her towards a dark, secluded corner. "I hate it."

They reached their destination and she turned to look up at him expectantly, as though she knew exactly what he wanted to talk to her about.

"Heavensbee told me about his plan," he said.

"I know. He says you're refusing to help."

"And you're willing?" he asked incredulously.

"I'm not saying I'm excited about it. But I'm willing to do it. Because I think it will work."

"Have you thought about the implications of it? That it's misleading?"

She laughed and shrugged her shoulders. "Hey if you wanna make an omelet you gotta break some eggs."

"And you're willing to be one of those eggs?"

"I'm already an empty shell. What does it matter?"

He studied her so intently that she actually felt the need to take a step back. "You're still trying to pay for the arena," he said. "Jesus, when did cutting stop being enough?" But it was a rhetorical question, and she said nothing, only looked at the ground. He looked down at the top of her head. "Or was it never enough? And why should I be the one to collect the payment? I'm hardly worthy."

"Doesn't matter to me who collects it. As long as someone does. But it makes the most sense if you do it. It makes it so they didn't die in vain. The other 22."

He closed his eyes and shook his head.

"Look, don't worry about it," she said. "Another Career can do it. Gloss can do it."

"Wouldn't have the same effect though, would it?"

"No. Probably not. But maybe. Brutus probably could have done the trick. But Plutarch already sounded him out and he refused. Enobaria's always a possibility." She grinned, but Cato found nothing about this situation to be funny.

"If I say no is Gloss gonna do it?" he asked. "For sure?"

"Yes."

He clenched his jaw and turned his face away from her. And his gaze landed on the lecherous old man he'd seen the last time they were in the Capitol. The man who had leered at her. Who had run his hand down her back. Who had probably bought her and…

...and what they were asking him to do suddenly didn't seem so bad.

He weighed his options. He could be like Brutus. He could mentor tributes, future Victors, and continue the vicious cycle, claiming he had no other choice.

Or he could make  _this_  choice instead. To try to break the cycle.

"No. I'll do it," he finally said. "If you're gonna do it no matter what, it shouldn't be a random Career. It should be the person they hate most. The person who's guaranteed to get a rise out of Panem for it. So that it's not for nothing."

She nodded. "Thanks...I guess."

"Don't mention it."

Who was he, after all, to judge her? He had self-destructive thoughts and habits too. Just that morning he'd spent a solid five minutes on the balcony of his hotel room, staring down at the street below and wondering what pattern his blood would make when his body splatted onto the sidewalk.

And he might be a murderer and he might be a monster.

But he'd be damned if he'd be a hypocrite.

xxxxxxxxxx

Cato glared at Plutarch, his arms folded across his chest. "I'll do it, but I don't know how convincing I can be."

Plutarch let out a sigh, half relieved, half frustrated. "Look, I realize this is something that you're not terribly excited to do. But you're gonna have to try to channel the guy on top of the Cornucopia laughing as Peeta Mellark was torn to shreds by mutts. You're gonna have to be victorious. Triumphant. Smug. Vicious. Violent. You  _have_  to be violent, Cato."

Cato shook his head back and forth in disgust. "God this is sick. This is so fucking sick."

"Gloss is willing if you're not. But you can't keep going back and forth. Shit or get off the pot."

"If Gloss does it it will mean changing your original plan. And 1 might not go up then. 2's not gonna go no matter what. You know that right?"

"I know. But if 3 through 12 go up we'll probably be ok."

"No. 1 has to go up too. I don't want this to be for nothing. It's almost a sure thing if I do it. This makes it all fit together neatly. It's not as clean- _god_  that's a fucked up way for me to put that-it's not as clean if Gloss does it."

He dropped his head to his chest and put his hands over his eyes.

"Cato," Plutarch said softly. "You can still do this. Be the monster. One more time my friend. One more time."

Cato lifted his head and laughed, but it was a bitter sound. "One more time," he muttered.


	5. Chapter 5

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Disclaimer: I don't own THG or any of the characters.
> 
> Warnings: violence, rape/non-con, depression, self-harm, drug/alcohol abuse, suicidal ideation, mild sexual content, language

The next time she visited the Capitol, about a month later, Plutarch gave her a holo.

“This has your schedule of events and a map of the arena.  It’s all very detailed, but you’re gonna need to study it until you memorize it. You’ll be with Finnick, Mags and Haymitch, of course. Mags goes first. Finnick next. Then Haymitch. And then…then the fireworks begin.”

“What about the other 20?”

“They got the map as well. And each has their own schedule of events. Don’t worry about that yet. I don’t want you getting confused. For now just focus on committing this to memory.”

xxxxxxxxxx

She wasn’t a great actress and she knew it. So when Caesar and Claudius made the announcement about the quell twist, she just sat absolutely still and stared at the tv, unblinking, so they’d all think she was in shock.

But then Gale flipped over a chair and grasped his hair in his hands, and Prim started crying and so did her mother, and so she cried too.

But it wasn’t because she was afraid of dying.

It was because life--this life with these games and what they did, not to the tributes, but to their loved ones--hurt too much.

xxxxxxxxxx

She stayed up late the night before the reaping and found her mother in the kitchen, her eyes red and watery.

“I need to tell you something.”

Her mother turned to her and Katniss put her hands on her shoulders. “I need you to remember, when the time comes, that no matter what you see, no matter what it looks like, no matter how bad it seems, I _chose_ this. This was _my_ choice.”

“How?” her mother asked in disbelief. “How is any of this your choice? You’re the only female victor from our district. There was no other option.”

“Just trust me mom. And promise me that you won’t let Prim watch. _Promise._ ” Her voice was fierce and she shook her mother firmly. The thought of Prim witnessing the finale made her stomach churn. She wouldn’t understand. She’d be scarred for life.

Her mother gulped. “I promise.”

“Ok. One more thing. At some point, a group of Peacekeepers will try to take you away. Go with them. Without protest. You and Prim and Buttercup. And the Hawthornes. They’ll take them too. It will feel like you’re being arrested and it will look like it too, but trust me.” Her mother was staring at her in shock. “You’ll notice that the head of their squad has dark brown skin and wears a red cord around his wrist. It won’t be visible most of the time, because it will be under his glove, but he’ll make sure you see it somehow. It could be as early as right after the reaping that they take you, or it may be as late as the end of the third day of the games.”

“Katniss,” her mother breathed. “Did you know about this? That you were going to be reaped?”

She wanted to spill everything out to her mother, but the less she knew the better. “I’m not gonna answer any questions mom. Just do as I’m saying and trust me.” Her tone left no room for protest or argument.

“I love you,” she said, her voice softening, as she took her shaking mother into her arms. “And tell Gale,” she whispered against her shoulder. “About this being my choice. All of it. Because he won’t understand.”

xxxxxxxxxx

She found Gale early the next morning in the Meadow, and they sat, shoulder to shoulder, without saying a word, and watched the sunrise.

When the air turned thick and golden and the bees started humming in the clover, she knew she needed to head back. The cameramen would be outside her house soon.

She turned her face up and kissed Gale on the mouth, and he shuddered and let out one small sob. She caught it on an inhale and swallowed it.

Then she ran her fingers along his jaw, so that his sandpapery stubble caught on the callouses of her hands, before she stood and turned and left him there.

xxxxxxxxxx

Cato sat at the breakfast table in his mansion in Victor’s Village, staring out the window. He was thinking about Katniss. About how soon it would be time for her to leave her house for the reaping. About how she was probably saying goodbye to her mother and her sister. About how she was probably saying goodbye to that boy who had kissed her. Who had probably fucked her.

No one would come to say goodbye to him. For one thing, they all thought that one of the older Victors from 2 would volunteer. But even if they’d known that it was Cato who would enter the quell, they probably wouldn’t have shown up anyway. He didn’t love anyone like that. No one loved him like that.

 _It’s better this way_ he lied to himself. _It makes it easier_.

xxxxxxxxxx

Two hours later he stood on the podium, third from center stage in a long line of male victors. “I volunteer,” he said before Paris, District 2’s escort, could even read out the name he had drawn.

No one challenged him.

He could imagine the commentary from Claudius and Caesar already.

About how, even though they’d expected one of the older men to volunteer, it wasn’t all that surprising that Cato Hadley had stepped up to the challenge. After all, he’d been livid when, one year ago, he had been forced to share his victory with Katniss Everdeen, and why wouldn’t he be excited at the prospect of a do-over?

xxxxxxxxxx

Effie Trinket was cheerful as ever as she pranced across the stage, covered in monarch butterflies.

“As always, ladies first,” she said and reached into the glass bowl to retrieve the one slip of paper it held. She took her time making her way back to the microphone, as if to draw out the suspense, and unfolded the paper. Then she shook her shoulders back, opened her mouth and--

“Oh _jesus christ_.” Katniss spat, rolling her eyes. “This is so fucking stupid. I volunteer.” And she strode to the center of the stage, as Effie glared at her for stealing her thunder.

“I volunteer too,” Haymitch echoed. He winked at her as they shook hands and then they turned their backs to the audience together and walked into the Justice Center, leaving Effie and the Peacekeepers who were supposed to escort them into the building standing there stupidly.

xxxxxxxxxx

Cato liked his costume for the parade this year much better than the last one.

After he’d agreed to the plan, he’d felt strangely relieved. He wasn’t excited for the things he was about to do in the arena--he dreaded them in fact--but for the first time since he’d won his games, he felt like he had some control over his own life.

And so he had cut way back on the alcohol and the morphling, and his burns had mostly healed, and he started working out again, quickly regaining the perfect physique he’d started to lose after his victory so that he looked incredible in the getup his stylist, Acadia, had concocted for him.

She had spackled his skin and hair in some kind of stone colored makeup and draped a stiff matching toga over him, and then she had spent hours using putty and delicate little tools and makeup a shade or so darker to create cracks and veins and chips and embossed patches so that by the time she was done he looked like a living statue. The best part, he thought, were the black contact lenses that covered the entire visible portion of his eyeballs, covering up the whites and irises completely.

Enobaria, who matched him, was also enthusiastic.

“Now just stare at 12 once we’re on camera,” she said to him as they climbed into the chariot. “With those creepy black eyes. It’ll get everyone talking about how much you hate her and how determined you are to kill her. It’ll really set the tone for this whole thing. Oh god, the buildup to you two will be incredible.”

He did just that. And Enobaria was right. When they watched the coverage of the parade later that night, they couldn’t stop talking about the menacing way he’d stared Katniss down.

He rolled his eyes. Little did they know he’d just been admiring the way her body looked in that dress.

xxxxxxxxxx

Training was much more relaxed this time, since all 24 of them knew how this whole thing was gonna go down anyway.

No one hid their talents, and in fact, they all gathered around and watched each other with admiration.

“Oh god this isn’t gonna be fun,” Seeder from 11 said as she watched Johanna from 7 launch an ax into a dummy. “That’s gonna be me in a few days.”

Johanna turned and grinned. “You gonna chicken out, old woman?”

Seeder reached out and cuffed her affectionately. “Show some respect for your elders young lady.”

Cato wandered over to the spear station, where old Woof from 8 sat cross legged on the floor, watching Cashmere practice.

“Why did you agree to this?” he asked as he sat down beside him.

Woof shrugged. “I’m old. It’s my time. And I’m sick. I’m on my third bout of cancer, and I just don’t have the energy for the chemo this time. My whole body hurts. I’m tired son.”

Cato nodded and clapped the older man on the shoulder gently. “So...I’ll snap your neck?”

“Sounds good. Sounds a hell of a lot better than wasting away.”

xxxxxxxxxx

“You look tired,” Katniss said to Finnick on the second day.

“I was up late last night. With a client.” He gave her a wry smile, but his eyes were sad.

Her heart broke for him. “How do you get through it?”

“Well they give me a pill to help with the physiological part of it. So that I can perform.”

“That’s not what I meant. I meant emotionally.”

Finnick studied her for a moment before he answered. “I pick something random to focus on like the pattern of the wallpaper. Or the base of a lamp. And I study it. Everything about it. Its outline, its texture, the way the light reflects off of it. Everything. After a while, everything else fades into the background.”

xxxxxxxxxx

Cato and Katniss met every night in the sparring room for an hour or so.

She had suggested that they practice ahead of time.

“Practice?” Cato had asked her skeptically.

“Well not the whole thing, obviously. But the lead up, yes. If I know what I’m expecting it will make it..easier...for me.”

“If we draw it out enough, do you think maybe they’ll riot in enough time that I won’t need to--”

“No. I wish I could say that I thought that would work. That we could draw it out long enough. But the reality is I don’t think we can. Well, I take that back. We could. But then I would really suffer before the end of it. I think it’s better if we just get it over with.”

Cato sighed. “Alright. How do you want to start?”

“I don’t know how I feel about the sword. What if you don’t have one at the time?”

“I’ll have whatever weapon we plan for me to have. He’ll make sure of it.”

“Even best laid plans can go awry. Best to be flexible.”

Cato sighed again and tossed the weapon to the side of the room. “Fine. No sword.”

xxxxxxxxxx

He was terrifying in his interview.

He was itching to get back into the arena, he told Caesar.

He would kill as many tributes as he could, but it was the Girl on Fire he was most excited for.

She had robbed him of his victory, he said.

This was his chance, he said. His chance to finally get what he deserved.

He would make her pay, he said. He would make her pay dearly. She would wish she had never been born.

She was unimpressed by his threats, she said, when it was her turn to go on.

He was dead already, she said.

He just didn’t know it, she said.

 _No I know_ he whispered as he watched her on the monitor backstage. _I know I’m dead_.

xxxxxxxxxx

“I see we’re continuing with the theme of objectifying the victors,” Katniss said to Cinna the next morning as he helped her into her black bikini. “What are the guys in?”

“Black swim trunks,” he said. “No shirt.”

“God, we’re all gonna get nasty sunburns. Or at least those of us who make it past the bloodbath.”

“It’s not real sun,” Cinna reminded her, and handed her a bottle of water. “Drink up. You won’t get that spile until after dark.”

“Poor Chaff,” she said as she downed the entire thing in three gulps.

“Poor Chaff,” Cinna agreed, as the technician entered to inject her with her tracker.

“And now, Miss Everdeen, look that way for me please,” she said when she was done with the tracker.

“It tickles,” Katniss complained as the woman inserted something into her ear.

“Well it’s going to hurt in just a sec--”

“Aahh!” she cried. “God, what did you do, stab me in the eardrum?”

“More or less,” said the technician with a smile.

“Fucking sadist.”

“Katniss? Katniss can you hear me?” Plutarch’s voice said in her ear.

“Yes. I can hear you. My family and the Hawthornes. Are they safe?”

“They’re still in 12. My Peacekeepers are shadowing them. They’re the highest ranking unit in 12 right now, so no other squads will argue with them about anything they do. And the hovercraft is just outside the fence.”

“Good.”

“Ready to go?”

“Ready as I’ll ever be.”

xxxxxxxxxx

As they rose up out of the salt water, they shielded their eyes with their hands until they adjusted to the artificial sunlight.

Finnick located the trident at the back of the Cornucopia, exactly where they had said it would be.

Cato located the sword.

Johanna, the ax.

Cashmere, the spear.

Gloss, the longknife.

Katniss, the bow and arrows.

Enobaria bared her teeth.

Haymitch caught Katniss’s eye and winked.

Seeder gave Chaff a sympathetic look.

Cecilia from 8 smiled sadly at Woof. _Goodbye my friend_ her eyes said. He nodded at her once, and returned her smile.

Cato turned his head to stare down Katniss Everdeen. _I’m coming for you_ he mouthed.

And then the timer ran out and the games began.


	6. Chapter 6

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Disclaimer: I don't own THG or any of the characters.
> 
> Warnings: violence, rape/non-con, self-harm, depression, alcohol/drug abuse, suicidal ideation, sexual content, language
> 
> The little speech Cato gives about using his hands instead of his sword is inspired by the Joker's speech in the interrogation room in Dark Knight.
> 
> As Effie Trinket would say, this is a big, big, big chapter, so fasten your seatbelts kids! Let me know what you think.
> 
> Thanks for reading!

I don't want your money

I don't want your crown

See I've come to burn your kingdom down

Holy water cannot help you now

See I've come to burn your kingdom down

And no rivers and no lakes can put the fire out

I'm gonna raise the stakes

I'm gonna smoke you out

                                                                                                                            - _Seven Devils_ , Florence + the Machine

Katniss reached the Cornucopia just in time to see Finnick snatch up the trident and pivot to impale Ephraim from 5 through the right lung.

She slung the bow and quiver of arrows over her shoulder and jumped right back into the water, ducking a knife that Rhiannon from 10 threw at her.

She tread water as she tried to locate Haymitch.

There he was. Grappling with Dighton from 9. She continued to swim toward the shoreline, but turned her head back several times to furrow her brow in concern as the two men fought. She had to look worried. Haymitch was her district partner after all. But the battle didn't last long, and less than a minute later, Dighton's limp body floated facedown in the water.

When she reached the shore, she turned back to wait for the others. Finnick was the first to join her, and she monitored Mags's progress as she swam towards them. Gloss, who was hovered on one of the rock partitions separating the wedges of salt water, was about to jump in to attack Mags, but Katniss warned him off by aiming an arrow at his chest.

Finnick took his old mentor by the arm to help her out of the water, and less than a minute later, Haymitch joined them, breathing hard from his exertions.

Just before they turned to head into the rainforest, Katniss caught sight of Seeder's body. She was floating, facedown, just like Dighton, but the water around her was red and cloudy.

Haymitch had known Seeder for years, and he had introduced Katniss to her right after she'd won her games. Seeder had been warm and motherly, tucking Katniss's hair behind her ear and asking her how she was holding up at every function in the Capitol. She'd fill up her plate and cluck her tongue, chiding Katniss that she was getting too thin and needed to eat more.

But Katniss felt no grief as she looked at Seeder's body. She'd see her soon anyway.

xxxxxxxxxx

Cato did not go right for the Cornucopia. He was a fast swimmer. He'd get there in half the time it took most of the others.

The first thing he did was swim over to the tribute to his right, Woof from 8, and, with a quick look in the old man's eyes that said  _Rest In Peace_ , he snapped his neck and dropped him back into the water.

When he reached the Cornucopia, he called out Gloss's name. Gloss picked up the sword that lay near him and tossed it, hilt first, to Cato, who pivoted back around to see Iola from 9 hoisting herself up onto the rocks.

She didn't make it far, because Cato jabbed her in the shoulder with the tip of the sword and kicked her in the face. She fell right back into the water. He jumped down in with her and slashed her thigh, and then he held her head underwater as crimson tendrils escaped from her body and began to curl around his.

She struggled and thrashed her arms, but he scruffed her like a kitten and held her down until she went limp.

Then he turned and swam to the shore to join Enobaria and to wait for the Careers from 1.

His work was done for today.

He counted in his head as the cannon blasted eight times a few minutes later.

Ephraim from 5

Roach from 6

Cecilia from 8

Dighton from 9

Iola from 9

Rhiannon from 10

Seeder from 11

And Woof.

He bowed his head as his throat closed up.

xxxxxxxxxx

Day 2 was uneventful for Katniss and company. Nothing eventful was set to happen for them until after dark.

But the cannon went off several times during the day.

She was standing on the beach with Mags when the tidal wave engulfed the section almost directly across from them.  _There goes Loa_  she thought as the cannon sounded for the woman from 5.

Wiress from 3 was next.

Then, a couple of hours later, it boomed for Jesse from 10.

And then for Blight from 7.

When it went off twice in the space of a few minutes, she knew that it signaled the deaths of Gloss and Cashmere, and she wondered if 1 had gone up yet.

Right around sunset, the cannon sounded for Taryn from 6, and Katniss glanced discreetly at Mags.

It would be showtime for her in just a couple of hours.

They settled down to eat some fish and drink from the water they had collected in some coconut shells using the spile, and when it was time to sleep, Katniss volunteered to take the first watch.

But she "dozed off," and she didn't lift her head again until she heard Plutarch's voice in her ear, telling her to look lively. She woke the others just in time, and Finnick tossed Mags onto his back and they ran as fast as they could from the strange fog.

Haymitch and Finnick took turns carrying Mags, but eventually they grew too "tired," and the old woman, not wanting to slow them down, took Finnick's face in her hands, kissed him heartily on the lips, and wandered into the mist before anyone could stop her.

Finnick cried out and dropped to his knees, and for a second there, it looked like he was thinking about following his mentor, but Katniss and Haymitch pulled him to his feet and dragged him off, and he recovered his senses just in time.

Later, after they had escaped the fog, Finnick sat with his head in his hands and rocked back and forth as tears streamed down his face.

Katniss watched him sympathetically.  _You'll see her soon_  she wanted to whisper, but she couldn't. So she put her arm around his shoulders instead.

She felt pity for Mags's suffering, but she felt no grief for the old woman. After all, she, like Finnick, would see her soon.

xxxxxxxxxx

Cato had one item on his agenda for Day 2, but it was a big one.

He waited until the afternoon, when it was hot and muggy and the four Careers sought shelter among the foliage, just beside a small freshwater pool they had "stumbled" across. Cashmere and Gloss settled down for a "nap," and Enobaria went off to "hunt."

The pact between 1 and 2 was all but sacred. Every year, their four tributes teamed up, and they  _did not_  break their alliance until it was down to just them, whether there were 2, 3 or all 4 left. At that point, whichever of them remained gave each other a day's head start, and then they began to hunt one another.

To do otherwise, Cato had learned at the Academy, was unthinkable. It was profane, it was a sin. It was a betrayal of the worst kind.

But Cato and Gloss, it was well known, did not like one another. They were both young, virile, good looking. Rivals for the attention of the ladies. It had not been apparent at first, but in the three months or so leading up to the quell, they'd made derisive comments both about and to each other, and things had, on more than one occasion, gotten heated between them, until they appeared to be engaging in one long, giant pissing contest.

One clever businesswoman had even designed t shirts for the teenage girls of the Capitol to buy so they could proclaim their preferences on their chests.  _Team Cato_ was splashed across the front of the black shirt in silver glitter, and if you were  _Team Gloss_  you wore a gray shirt with black glitter.

When the announcement regarding the twist had been made, the two victors had calmed down and civilly agreed to the usual alliance.

But when Cato heard Plutarch's voice in his ear, telling him it was showtime, he was done with civility.

He picked up the hefty rock that lay next to his feet, and he fixed his eyes on Gloss's "sleeping" form. He waited until the big toe of his right foot twitched, the signal that said  _Come at me bro, I'm ready_ , and then he crept stealthily towards his body.

He had smashed both of his kneecaps before Cashmere "woke up" and, screaming like a banshee and clawing like a cat, jumped onto his back. He tossed her off of him, just as Gloss managed to grab him around the neck, but Cato grasped his wrist with one hand, and using the rock in his other he broke Gloss's arm.

Then he stood and hurled the rock into the trees, and he turned to face Cashmere. She "struggled" and "fought" admirably, but Cato eventually got her pinned down, and he wrapped his hands around her neck and began to squeeze.

"No!" Gloss cried out. "No!" He had rolled over onto his stomach, and using his one good arm, he was crawling toward them, but he was powerless to help his sister and he knew it.

Cato threw back his head and laughed sadistically.

"Do you know why I prefer to use my hands instead of my sword?" he asked Gloss. "Because it's so much more personal, so much more gratifying. You can  _feel_  the life draining out of them. A sword feels good in my hands, sure, but this-" he jerked on Cashmere's neck lightly-"this is power. This gets me high."

Gloss was screaming frantically by now, dragging himself through the sand as he watched Cato strangle his sister, but by the time he reached them it was too late; Cashmere had gone limp and the cannon had sounded.

Cato roared triumphantly and stood before kicking Gloss in the face. Then he dragged him into the pool and drowned him.

"Good job," he heard in his ear. "1 has officially gone up."

"And Team Cato for the win," he said, a nasty sneer on his face.

"Oh jesus, Cato. Really?" Enobaria said as she emerged from the trees. "I swear, sometimes you're such a fucking douchebag."

xxxxxxxxxx

The cannon woke her at sunrise on the morning of Day 3.  _There went Johanna_  she thought.

By mid-morning, the humidity was oppressive, and storm clouds had started to gather at the top of the dome.

Katniss pictured Chaff, lying on his back somewhere on the other side of the arena, staring up at the clouds longingly, praying for them to break open and end his suffering. The thought almost brought her to tears, but then the jabberjays started up.

Maysilee screamed for Haymitch, and so did his mother and his brother.

It was Annie Cresta's voice, along with his mother's and father's, that tormented Finnick.

When Prim and Peeta began to cry out for Katniss, she almost lost her sanity. She dropped to her knees, hands over her ears, and buried her face in the grass, screaming and rocking back and forth. The only thing that kept her from going over the edge was the soothing voice in her ear, reassuring her that Prim was just fine and that Peeta was in a better place now.

When it ended an hour later, the three of them sat up, dazed and with red eyes.

Katniss threw her arms around her mentor, who was shaking. He drew back after a few seconds, and gently kissed her forehead, which was raw and bloody from being rubbed back and forth across the grass for an hour.

"I'm sorry," Plutarch said to them. "But it wasn't for nothing. 4 and 12 have gone up. They're on the hovercraft now. The Everdeens and the Hawthornes. And they grabbed the Mellarks as well. They had to tranq your friend Gale, by the way. They got Annie out of 4 too, Finnick."

And Katniss realized, for the first time, why she had been placed with Finnick for the quell. It was because they were the two with the most to lose.

xxxxxxxxxx

Enobaria found them a couple of hours later, when the clouds still hung, pregnant with rain, heavy in the top of the dome.

Katniss shot her in the thigh, but not before she'd managed to bite into Finnick's throat and drag him into the water to bleed out. Then she yanked the arrow out of her leg and hobbled off as the cannon sounded.

Katniss screamed and ran out into the water to drag Finnick's body onto the sand, but Haymitch caught her around the waist. "It's no use," he said, holding her to him.

She calmed down and turned to look up at her mentor.  _Besides_  his eyes said,  _you'll see him soon anyway_.

xxxxxxxxxx

"What the hell happened?" Cato asked when Enobaria came limping up to him.

"Fucking Firegirl got me in the leg with an arrow," she said, her eyes blazing. "It hurts like a motherfucker. See if you can get me some fresh water to clean it."

But Cato just narrowed his eyes at her. "Now why should I do that? You're pretty much dead weight to me now." He stood slowly and reached for his sword.

"You wouldn't."

"We  _are_  down to the final six. And you're easy prey. Really I'm just doing you a favor." He raised the sword.

"Bastard," she hissed. "And I thought you preferred to use your hands."

"So I do. Thanks for the reminder."

He dropped the sword and cracked his knuckles, and two minutes later the cannon sounded for the female from 2.

xxxxxxxxxx

Sometime around late afternoon the cannon sounded for Chaff.

Before the hovercraft had even collected his body, the clouds opened and it began to pour.

It was fucking sick. The irony of it.

But what would have saved Chaff proved to be the end for Beetee, who was struck by lightning a few minutes later.

"Well sweetheart, it's just us and Cato. I think we should split up. I don't want it to come down to you and me. I'll see if I can maim him somehow. Make it so you stand a chance against him."

It was part of the plan, but Katniss found herself starting to panic, and she did not have to act as she cried and threw her arms around her mentor.

"Love ya sweetheart," he whispered as he kissed the top of her head.

They looked into each other's eyes one last time.  _I'll see you soon_  they said.

And then he wandered off into the trees.

A little over an hour later the cannon sounded, and Katniss put her head between her knees and sobbed.

And then, instead of abating, the storm somehow strengthened, and the wind picked up, and a sudden gust took hold of the light aluminum bow at her feet and blew it into the water, where it was caught up by angry, churning waves and thrust beneath the surface.

"No!" she cried and sprinted in after it, scrambling furiously, stirring up the sand and muck beneath her feet as she searched for it.

And then she saw him.

He stood at the treeline, at her one o'clock, and he was laughing at her.

She slowly edged in a diagonal path toward her 11 o'clock, so she could make it to shore and sprint off in the opposite direction of him.

But he was looking at her as a predator looks at its prey, and for every step she took, he took 2.

She picked up her speed, and so did he, and by the time she was at the shore, he was only fifteen feet from her.

Their eyes met, and the look in his had changed. It was no longer laughing or predatory. Instead it held a question. Neither of them moved. Katniss stared at him, her chest heaving as she tried to figure out what he was asking.

And then she realized.

He was asking if she was still ok with this. He was waiting for a signal from her. He was telling her he'd back off and abandon the plan if she so much as shook her head at him.

And part of her wanted to. But there were too many Rues and too many Prims. So she inclined her head, the slightest bit and narrowed her eyes.  _Come on_  she said.  _Let's get this over with_.

It felt like slow motion. They'd practiced the beginning of it dozens of times, but still, she felt a surge of panic and the fear with which she fled from him was genuine. She could hear the sound of each and every one of his footsteps as he gained on her.

And then his hands were around her waist and she was hurled to the ground. The force of it bruised her shoulder and her hip and sent her head bouncing off the beach. She rolled over onto her stomach and she dug her fingers into the wet sand, just like she was supposed to, and started to push herself up.

But he had dropped to his knees behind her and he grabbed her ankles and yanked her body backwards toward his. And then he ripped her swimsuit bottoms down her thighs, and as she tried to escape, they restricted her movement and slowed her down just enough for him to pin her calves down with his knees.

And there she was, on all fours, live to the nation, naked from the waist down.

He snatched her right wrist and twisted it painfully behind her back and with his left hand, he shoved her head into the sand.

And then, with one violent thrust, he was inside of her.

He threw his head back and crowed like a caveman up into the sky.

It felt like she was being ripped in half down the middle and she cried out. The force of him slamming into her over and over again caused tears to spring up in her eyes and mingle with the rain on her cheeks.

She didn't even have to pretend, it hurt so bad. She squirmed, trying to scramble forward and away from him, but it was a pointless endeavor. He had her pinned, completely under his control, and he was far too strong for her. Even when she put everything she had into trying to get away, she managed to move only centimeters.

After a minute or so, she just gave up and, remembering what Finnick had said during training, she turned her head to the side and tried to fix her gaze on one of her handprints in the sand, so she could trace the shape of it over and over with her eyes as Cato dug his fingers into her hips hard enough to leave bruises.

She felt like a rag doll. He pushed her forward when he pulled out and he pulled her back when he slammed in.

Back, forth, back, forth went her hips.

Back, forth, back, forth went the side of her face in the sand.

It felt like forever, but it lasted only a few minutes, and then he cried out like an animal and slumped over her body, his forehead between her shoulder blades.

She twisted her face into the sand so he wouldn't see it and sobbed.

And then she heard Plutarch's voice in her ear. "Oh my god it worked! It worked. Oh my god. We've cut the cameras. Snow ordered us to. They've all gone up except for 2. The hovercraft's almost there to pick you up. That was beautiful you two. You were amazing."

He moved off of her and she fell forward and went limp, her right arm still behind her back, as she processed Plutarch's words.

It had worked.

The choreographed rape of Katniss Everdeen by Cato Hadley had spurred the remaining districts into full-fledged riots.

When her breathing returned to normal, she pulled her bottoms back up and pushed herself to a sitting position, brushing her matted hair out of her eyes and wiping the sand and the tears from her face. She tucked her chin to her collarbone and turned her head to peek over her shoulder at Cato, wondering how he was reacting to the success of their plan.

But he didn't appear to be thinking about what he'd just heard. Instead, he was looking down at the blood on himself. He lifted his eyes to Katniss's face and looked at her first in confusion, and then in shock.

"Are you a virgin?"

"I was. Until a few minutes ago."

She was not at all prepared for what happened next.

His face took on a look of pure, simple rage, and before she could register what was happening, she was on her back and he was hovering over her, his hands on her wrists, pinning them to the ground above her head.

"WHY DIDN'T YOU TELL ME?!" he screamed into her face. He took her by the straps at her shoulders and shook her so hard her teeth rattled against one another, and then he released her abruptly, and her head thudded onto the wet sand. His fist slammed down beside her face over and over and over again. "WHY?! WHY?! WHY?! WHY?!"

He looked raw and feral and somehow Katniss thought she'd never seen anyone so perfectly human and inhuman at the same time.

And then all of a sudden he went unconscious and collapsed, limp, on top her.

"Katniss are you ok?" It was Plutarch, in her ear again. "Don't worry, we released his tranqs. He should be out for at least five minutes or so."

She didn't say anything.

"Katniss? Did you hear me? Are you ok?"

"Define ok," she whispered.


	7. Chapter 7

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Disclaimer: I don't own THG or any of the characters.
> 
> Warnings: violence, rape/non-con, alcohol/drug abuse, self-harm, suicidal ideation, depression, sexual content, language

They sat in a room in 13 and watched reconnaissance footage of every district in Panem except 2 rioting.

Ephraim and Roach and Cecilia and Dighton and Iola and Rhiannon and Seeder and Loa and Wiress and Jesse and Blight and Cashmere and Gloss and Taryn and Mags.

Most of them were surrounded by their own medical team of surgeons and nurses and pain management specialists.

Almost all of them had sutures of some sort.

Many of them had had to have blood transfusions.

Mags was slathered in a soothing mud mixture to help with her blisters.

Blight had a concussion from hitting his head when he was thrown back from the force field.

Poor Gloss had it the worst. He'd had to have surgery on three of his limbs, all of them involving bone grafting and steel plates and pins, and he was so doped up on morphling, that he wasn't really aware of what was going on.

Cecilia sat between Taryn and Seeder, who each held a hand and murmured soothingly to her as she cried over the loss of her district partner, Woof.

The final hovercraft was making its way from the arena to District 13, and onboard, a doctor bent over Finnick, checking the stitches of the superficial bite wound in his throat, as a nurse tried to help him scrub off the blood-red dye that had bubbled up from the salt water beneath him and stained his skin.

"Shut up," he growled as Johanna laughed at him. She had a wound that matched his, but her fake blood had seeped out from a hidden pocket on the jungle floor, as she lay facedown horizontally on a hill and so that only her neck and shoulder were stained.

Beetee sat with Chaff, holding his old friend's hand and feeling guilty that he had only been struck by "lightning" that was nothing more than special effects before they'd activated the tranqs in his tracker and set the cannon off for him, whereas poor Chaff had volunteered to go without water for three days. They'd monitored his vitals through his tracker carefully, ready to "kill him off" earlier than planned if necessary, but he'd managed to go the whole time. Now he guzzled water as an attendant adjusted the IV bag over his head and kept an eye on him to make sure he didn't go overboard and accidentally flood his cells.

Haymitch and Enobaria were in relatively good shape. Each had a set of twin bruises, the size and shape of Cato's hands, around their throats, and Enobaria had a puncture wound in her thigh.

Half of Katniss's face had been rubbed raw, her forehead from friction against grass, her cheek and temple from friction against sand. Her entire body hurt from straining as she'd instinctively tried to escape from Cato. The space between her legs was sore and throbbing-and not in a good way. Her shoulder was bruised, and the outline of Cato's fingers was plain to see just above her hipbones and around her right wrist.

But it was her heart that hurt the most as she looked at Cato, who was huddled in on himself in the corner facing the wall.

He wouldn't look at her. But she was ok with that. She wasn't sure she wanted him to. She wasn't upset with him. After all, she had agreed to this, and he'd been the more reluctant of the two of them. But it didn't make things any less painful, and in that moment, Katniss thought to herself that if she never saw him again that would be just fine with her.

Still, she felt terrible for him. She didn't fully understand what he was going through, but something told her she wasn't the only one who felt as though she'd been ripped in two by the whole experience.

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The medical team cleaned her and Cato up and gave them some clothes to wear, and as soon as she entered 13, her mother and Prim threw themselves at her.

Mrs. Everdeen had kept her promise, and so Prim had no idea what had happened, but Katniss had a difficult time meeting her mother's eyes.

Cato stood off to the side, all alone and still unwilling to make eye contact with anyone.

And then Gale appeared, fists clenched and shaking. "You son of a bitch!" he ground out through clenched teeth.

Cato didn't react when he punched him in the face.

"Gale!" Katniss cried.

"Fight me!" Gale roared, punching him again. "Fight me, you motherfucker! Fight me!"

But Cato wouldn't. He just looked at Gale with eyes full of pain as the blood began to flow from his nose.

Instead of diffusing Gale's rage, Cato's pacifism inflamed it, and in a matter of seconds, he was laid out on the cement floor as Gale drove his fist into his face over and over.

"Gale!" Katniss cried again. "No, Gale you don't understand!" She grasped his shoulder, trying to pull him back, but he shrugged her off roughly.

A swarm of men in olive green jumpsuits rushed past her and pulled him off of Cato. Still, he thrashed and fought, knocking two of them to the ground before a third finally pulled out a tranq gun and stuck him with it. Gale went limp and they hauled him off.

"Sorry about that," one of the men said to Cato. "We probably should have anticipated something like that would happen given his reaction when he watched you two…" he trailed off.

Katniss, physically and emotionally exhausted, sank to the floor and put her head between her knees.

"Come on honey," her mother coaxed her. "You need a meal and a good long sleep."

She didn't think she had the energy to move, but her mother was pulling up gently on her arm. "Fine," she sighed, and when she looked up, it was to the sight Cato's back as he retreated down a long hallway.

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They fixed up his face, and showed him to a bedroom, utilitarian, but private, with its own tiny bathroom, and the first thing he did was tear off his clothes and turn on the shower. He scrubbed his penis under the hot water until it was practically raw, but he swore he could still see her blood on it.

He had been certain she'd had sex with the boy from home, Gale, and that the Capitol had sold her body the same way they'd sold his. He even thought it was possible she'd had sex with Loverboy before they went into the arena.

But she hadn't done any of those things, and now he was angry with her. It was true that her body was _her_ body and she could make her own choices (except, of course, when the Capitol said otherwise), but his body was _his_ body, and he had thought he understood what he was doing with it-and with hers-in that arena. He had assumed the only injuries she would sustain would be a few bruises and nothing more. But he had been mislead.

And there was something else about the experience that upset him. Something that scared him.

He had asked Plutarch to provide him with one of the pills he had used since he returned from his games, since he'd assumed that he would need to take it to fulfill his final responsibility in the quell, and although the gamemaker hadn't given him a pill, he had ensured that a vial of the same chemical was placed in his tracker, to be released into his bloodstream when Cato gave the agreed upon signal.

But it had never been released. He hadn't needed it. He felt like a monster. It hadn't technically been rape, but it was close enough.

And he'd gotten hard, all on his own for the first time in a year, at the sight of her lithe, graceful body in the water.

He had come, all on his own for the first time in a year, at the feeling of being inside of her.

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They settled into a routine.

The nation was under the impression that 22 of them, at least, had been killed in the arena. To the people of the Districts, the fate of Katniss Everdeen and Cato Hadley was unknown. It was widely accepted that Cato had either killed Katniss after he raped her and then been picked up by the Capitol, or that the Capitol had taken both of them and that she was now a prisoner.

The head of the resistance, Alma Coin, and the other leaders did nothing to correct the rumors, since both scenarios renewed Panem's outrage and kept the rebellion fueled.

Only the people of 13 knew the truth, and so that was where all 23 of them had to stay.

They never really saw anyone high-ranking. Their purposes had been served, and they were treated well. Fed and clothed and lodged and updated on the day's events just like everyone else in 13, but otherwise they were left to their own devices.

Although more than two thirds of the D13 soldiers had been deployed to the Capitol and the other districts, Cato spent the bulk of his days training those remaining behind in hand-to-hand combat. Some evenings he sat with a few of the other victors, mostly Haymitch and Finnick and Beetee, while they talked over the status of the revolution, but he never said much. He stopped by to say hi to Gloss a few times a week. The two of them, though not exactly friends, had not disliked each other either, only playing up the rivalry as a buildup to Cato's "betrayal" in the arena. And though Gloss harbored no ill will towards him for his three broken limbs (after all he'd agreed to it), Cato felt guilty nevertheless.

Katniss found that her skills weren't particularly relevant in this new environment. The soldiers shot guns rather than arrows, and they had already learned all of the survival skills they needed. But after her father's death, she had been the one to cook for her family for the first few years, until her mother gradually came out of her fog of grief, and so she returned to it here. She didn't really enjoy it, but she was good at it and it gave her something productive to do with her time. At night, she shared a room with Prim and her mother.

Gale had fully immersed himself in training to go into combat in one of the districts or the Capitol, so the two of them only saw each other a couple of days a week, and when they did, it was painfully awkward.

As for Cato…

He and Katniss never spoke. They never even looked at one another during the rare times-usually at meals, where he was careful to choose a table on the opposite side of the dining hall-that they were in the same room at the same time.

They passed each other one day in the hallway, and Katniss glanced at him, but he kept his eyes trained on the ground at his feet.

And so the days came and went, one after the other, each indistinguishable from the next.

At night, she felt stifled by guilt and confusion, while her mother and sister slept peacefully beside her.

In spite of all of her self-destructive behaviors, her old guilt over her first games remained, and now, added to it, was a fresh layer over Cato, whose body had not been his own since he was six years old. Now she was just one more person who had manipulated it.

And she was confused because she didn't know whether or not she had done the right thing by agreeing to Plutarch's scheme. It was terrifying, really, the power that she had wielded in that arena. And maybe there was something to what Cato asked her the night he'd agreed to participate in the plan: _Have you thought about the implications of it? That it's misleading?_

 _No I did the right thing_ , she tried to comfort herself. _Anything is better than this-Snow, the games, the Peacekeepers, the starvation._

_Right?_

_After all, it's better to see a child shot to death by a Peacekeeper than watch them slowly starve._

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Night was Cato's least favorite time.

For one thing there were the nightmares. On top of all of the tributes he'd killed and Clove, he had started seeing Thresh's sister in his sleep. And Katniss. Crying out in pain (which he now knew had been genuine rather than feigned) as she struggled to get away from him, and then burying her face in the sand and sobbing.

But trying to stay awake as he lay in bed was no better. It was too quiet, too still, and his thoughts and feelings rushed in to fill the vacuum.

They were not pleasant.

For years he had been sure of his destiny as a proud, glorious Victor, but now he didn't understand his place in the world. He wasn't sure that he _had_ a place in the world.

What he did understand was that he had never really had any control over his own life, although he hadn't realized it until after his first games.

Maybe he was meant to do nothing more than play the villain to her heroine.

And if that was the case, well then, he was past his expiration date, wasn't he?

One of the soldiers he was training in hand-to-hand combat had shown him his gun. He had demonstrated how to load it and unlock the safety. How to cock it and aim it and how to pull back steadily on the trigger. They had gone to target practice together.

Cato looked up at the plain white wall above his bed and wondered what his brains would look like splattered across it.

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Katniss had never really been well-fed enough, until recently, for her periods to be regular. So she didn't think anything of it when six weeks, and then seven weeks, and then eight weeks passed and she failed to bleed between her legs.

And she didn't think anything of it the first day she lost her lunch in the toilet.

But on the second day, as she wiped the vomit from the corners of her mouth with the back of her hand, it hit her.

"Oh _fuck,_ " she whispered, as she rested her forehead against the cool porcelain bowl.


	8. Chapter 8

Katniss made her way down the hall slowly, like a woman walking toward her execution.

Each footstep echoed emphatically off the walls. _Thud. Thud. Thud_.

 _Katniss, you_ _have_ _to tell him_. That was what her mother had said. And she was right.

Section F, Room 107. That was him. That's what Haymitch had told her as he glanced at her curiously, wondering why she wanted the information, but knowing better than to ask.

She took a shaky breath and lifted her hand and knocked softly.

 _Please don't be here. Please don't be here. Please don't be here_.

Of course he would be here. It was 6:45am, and she was trying to catch him before breakfast at 7.

She heard shuffling inside and then the door opened a crack and he peeked out. He shook his head as if trying to clear it and rubbed his eyes sleepily, obviously confused as to what she was doing here.

"Katniss?" he asked, as though he wasn't sure if he was awake or dreaming, and his voice was thick with sleep.

It startled her. She'd never heard him say her name before. It had always been 12 or Girl on Fire.

"Yeah."

"What time is it?"

"6:45."

He just stood there, still rubbing his eyes with the heels of his hands.

"I have to talk to you about something," she said. "Can I come in?"

"Uh, sure," he opened the door further and stepped back to let her in. His hair was mussed and from the neck up he looked like a little boy. But he wore only boxers and from the neck down...that was an entirely different story.

Now that he was more awake, he'd returned to avoiding her eyes. "I don't, uh, there's nowhere for you to sit except the bed," he said as he threw on a t shirt.

"No that's ok I'll stand. You sit."

He just stood there, staring at the ground.

"I think you should sit," she said.

His eyes fluttered over her briefly, questioningly, and then back down to the floor.

"Cato please sit down." It came out desperate, a plea.

He did, eyes still downcast. _Finally_. God this was so awkward.

She cleared her throat. "They gave me birth control before the quell. It's, uh, supposed to be 99% effective."

His face took on a look of confusion. "Ok…?"

"I'm...apparently I'm the 1%."

She watched him process this information and make sense of it, her body tense as she waited for the explosion.

But there wasn't one. He just looked up into her eyes for the first time in more than eight weeks.

"You're pregnant." His tone was flat. Neutral. Devoid of emotion.

"Yeah."

"I'm the father."

"Yeah."

His eyes returned to the floor. She stood there, waiting for him to say something or ask something or display some kind of emotion but he didn't. He just sat there, staring at the ground.

"Are you ok?" she finally asked.

He shook himself and looked back up at her. "Uh, yeah. I'm fine. I'm good. I'm good."

"Ok. I'm gonna go now. You sure you're ok?"

"Yeah. I'm good."

"Ok, well I'll see you around."

"Yeah. See you."

And then she left.

Cato just sat there on the edge of his bed.

He didn't feel it yet. He didn't feel anything. He was in shock. But he knew it. He knew that for the first time in over a year, he was good.

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They didn't speak again after that morning, but he was different. Katniss could feel it. He was as quiet as ever, but there was a new lightness to him. As though something deep and dark had been lifted and he now walked on air.

And though they still didn't really look at each other, whenever they were in the same room she _saw_ him, felt his presence, the way she could see and feel the sun around her in the Meadow, even though she couldn't look directly at it for fear that its radiance would blind her.

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She needed to tell Gale somehow, even though things were still awkward between them, and she knew it. He was her best friend, and it didn't feel right to keep this from him. But she didn't know how or when.

Her opportunity presented itself late one morning in the middle of October. The air was unseasonably warm that day, and he had been given permission to go above ground and take a walk in the woods, so he asked her to come with him.

She dreaded it, but she had no good excuse to turn him down. But she really did miss him, and her heart leapt at the chance to get out and breathe in fresh air. She was beginning to feel like she was going to suffocate below ground.

It was awkward at first, but it got less so as their boots crunched over the fallen leaves. They talked about Gale's training and how they missed going hunting in 12. And about how the revolution was going so well that it looked like the whole thing would be over within another year, and about how Rory seemed to have developed a one-sided crush on Prim.

But they did not talk about the topic of Plutarch's plan and her most recent games. Their tongues avoided it like feet avoid shards of broken glass. Consciously. Carefully. Fully aware of its existence but tiptoeing around it.

They were almost back to the entrance to the bunker, and Katniss knew she needed to bite the bullet and just tell him.

"Gale," she cut him off while he was in the middle of laughing about the lovesick glances that Rory threw at Prim. "I need to tell you something. About what happened with me and Cato."

He stiffened immediately. "I know," he said bitterly. "It was all part of the plan. It wasn't what it looked like. They explained."

"No, that's not it," she said. "I mean, yes, it was part of the plan, but that's not what I have to tell you."

"Then what is it?" he asked, his voice dangerously low.

She closed her eyes and took a deep breath, steeling herself for the fireworks. But when she opened her eyes, Gale seemed to have lost his focus on her, and he was looking up at the sky.

"What the-?" he asked. A low rumble, almost like drawn out, far off thunder was unfolding above them. "Katniss. We need to get back underground. Now."

He didn't have to say it twice. They both broke into a sprint, and when they reached the entrance, the drones were just coming into view in the western sky.

"All the way down," Gale commanded her firmly over the sound of the alarm, as soon as they were inside. "To the cellar." Though the entire underground compound was, in theory, meant to withstand serious bombing, it had never been tested, and so, as a precaution, a huge, cavern-like structure nicknamed the "storm cellar," or "cellar" for short, had been built deep into the bowels of the earth, and that, they had been informed, was where they were to retreat in the event of an attack.

"Go!" Gale yelled. "Don't wait for me. I'll make sure the doors are sealed."

There was a time when Katniss might not have listened. When she might have been stubborn and insisted on waiting for him. Or maybe not. Maybe the thought of Prim would have sent her on ahead, albeit reluctantly. But now it was a primal fear for her unborn child that sent her racing down the stairs without a second thought.

She could hear a group of people arguing somewhere far below her. Something about not being able to wait any longer and having to seal the door to the cellar and people were yelling her name and Gale's.

She opened her mouth and and yelled "We're here! Wait!"

But at the exact same time, the first bomb fell. The earth shook and cement chunks rained down around her, and she doubled her speed as the lights began to flicker.

Another bomb fell, and another, and somewhere in between the blasts, she heard Gale scream her name in a voice that was so hoarse and desperate and animalistic that it didn't even sound like him as it bounced back and forth oof of the walls and the metal of the stairs, coming at her from above and below and sideways all at the same time. She panicked. Was he hurt? Should she go back and try to help him? But she couldn't. Her body was no longer her own, but the vessel for something precious and fragile, and so, even though it broke her heart, she kept going.

She was almost to the storm cellar-at the bottom of the very last staircase, in fact-when another bomb fell and the lights went out and she was enveloped in a black so dense she couldn't see her hand in front of her face.

She was terrified and she cried out, but Gale had caught up with her and his arms came around her and her back was pressed against his chest. As the bombs continued to fall, he edged her into what she soon realized was the nook beneath the staircase and together they sank to the floor and she curled up in a ball, her head tucked against her chest. He brought his legs around to bracket her body and bent his head protectively over hers.

But then he wedged one of his hands between her torso and her thighs, and he settled it possessively over her stomach, where new life had taken root.

And the knowledge slid into her, certain and swift, that this was not Gale holding her, but Cato.

It was not Gale who had screamed her name so desperately, but Cato.

"Katniss?!" Gale's voice echoed from somewhere up above in between two blasts.

"Down here!" she called back, as she pushed herself further into Cato's chest, further in between his legs. "It's ok! I'm ok!"

It went on for what seemed like forever. Blast after blast shook the world around them, as she huddled into herself, cocooned by Cato's warm, solid body. He was just as scared as she was- she could feel his body shaking, shivering into hers as hers shivered into his.

When it finally ended, minutes or hours (who knew?) later, they moved in tandem, releasing twin sighs of relief, stretching their cramped legs out in front of them at the same time to create a double v.

But he did not release her from his arms and she made no move to free herself. His head remained bent over hers, and he released another shaky sigh into her hair. His hand on her stomach did not relax, but tensed up even more, his fingers curling around her side.

"Katniss!" Gale called. She could hear his footsteps, slow and cautious, as he made his way down the stairs in the pitch black.

"I'm here!" she called. She knew she should stand up, but she felt frozen in place, powerless to move.

And then somewhere down the hallway she heard the heavy clank of the door.

"No, I think they were almost here," she heard a voice say, and then a faint light penetrated the stairwell. "Gale? Cato? Katniss?"

"Yeah. In here," Cato lifted his head and called out. He stood, bringing her to her feet as well, and they were joined by two soldiers whose faces Katniss recognized but couldn't put a name to.

Cato peeled himself off of her slowly, lingeringly, his hand on her stomach the last part of his body to break with hers. He did not lift it off all at once, but slid it regretfully from her centimeter by centimeter.

And she lifted her head to see Gale staring at Cato's hand on her lower abdomen, clearly confused. But he was a smart man, and in the space of a second, the confusion turned to understanding and then, as his eyes met hers, to pain and anger.

"You're pregnant. That's what you had to tell me." His tone was an accusing one, as though she'd done this on purpose to wound him.

"Gale-"

But he shook his head and clenched his jaw and turned and strode off.

Her mother rushed into the stairwell, cutting off the awkward silence that was threatening to ensue. "Where is she?!" she cried frantically, and then threw her arms around Katniss. "I can't!" she wailed. "I can't deal with this again!"

"It's ok mom, it's ok," Katniss tried to soothe, but her voice was still shaky.

Her mother pulled away from her. "Oh, you're a mess!" she said as she began to pick pieces of plaster out of her hair and brush the dust from her shoulders. "Come on, let's get you cleaned up. Your sister is worried sick."

As her mother led her away, Katniss turned back to meet Cato's eyes for the first time that day, and the expression in them was heavy and unreadable.

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"We had maybe ten minutes' warning," Haymitch told her later. "Wiress is working with a bunch of other scientists on improving the range of our radar detection so we have more time in the future. It's a miracle everyone made it down to the cellar in time. Although it looks like they were right about the top layer being strong enough to hold. You shoulda seen Cato though. Jesus. He was practically rabid. Screaming like a madman. A group of like five guys had to hold him down or he would have made it all the way out into the woods to look for you. Obviously, he managed to escape them anyway and make it out to the stairwell before they sealed off the cellar. I think he broke some poor guy's nose."

He looked at her curiously, expectantly, as though was waiting for her to say something. But she didn't. He sighed. "Look, sweetheart, I can't help it. I gotta ask. What the hell? I thought you two couldn't stand each other. And then you ask me where his room is and now this-"

"I'm pregnant," she said, ripping it off like a bandage.

"Whooooaah! Hoooooly shit! And it's _Cato's_? You sure?"

"Yes, I'm sure! Who else's would it be?"

"Are you two…?"

"No," she said emphatically. "No."

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"It's a girl," she said two months later, and handed Cato the ultrasound image.

She didn't know why, but for some reason she had assumed he'd want a boy. Maybe so he could turn it into a mini version of himself.

But he lit up like the sun. "A _girl_?" he asked.

"Yeah. A girl."

"A _girl_." His voice lingered on the word. Caressed it. Cherished it.

"Can I keep this?" He waved the paper in his hand.

She was surprised. "You want to?"

"If it's ok with you."

"Sure."

"Thanks."

He stared at it in wonder, and then he traced the image of his daughter's face with his index finger.

Katniss couldn't stop the laugh that bubbled up from her throat.

His head snapped up. "What?"

"Nothing...it's just...look at us. For once, instead of destroying a life, we created one."

"We created one," he echoed, his voice a whisper.

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He ran into her a few weeks later. She was carrying a twenty-pound bag of potatoes, transporting it from a storeroom to the kitchen.

"Whoa, whoa, whoa," he said, stopping her. "Give that to me. You shouldn't be carrying that. You're pregnant."

She shifted the bag out of his reach and gave him a withering look. "I'm not made out of glass Cato."

"But the baby," he said insistently, and grasped the sack, tugging it firmly from her hands. "Now where do you want me to put it?"

She furrowed her brow in a scowl and huffed, and he laughed. She looked like a petulant preteen, not a mother-to-be. "Up your ass," she spat, clearly offended by his patronizing of her.

So he reined himself in and bit his lip to keep from laughing again, and with an exasperated sigh, she turned toward the kitchen, and he followed on her heel.

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One night he visited the archives and found the footage of their first games together.

He watched the way she shoved her sister behind her at her reaping, the conviction with which she volunteered. He watched the way she gave the little girl from 11 extra food that first night they allied with each other, the way she curled around her in her sleeping bag to keep her warm. He watched the way she clamped her hand over Loverboy's-no _Peeta's_ -mouth to force him to swallow the sleep syrup so she could get his medicine from the feast. She was fiercely protective of those she loved. She would die for them in a heartbeat.

He watched the way she smoothed Rue's curls from her forehead. He watched the way she looked at Peeta as they traded stories to while away the hours in the cave. He remembered how her entire demeanor had changed as she turned from her mother to her sister at the train station during their Victory Tour. They were rare moments, but they were vivid glimpses of how soft and warm and tender she could be.

He turned off the footage and returned to his room, and as he lay in bed that night he thought to himself that he couldn't think of a better woman to be the mother of his child.

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She grew round and radiant and she carried his daughter high and tight in her belly and she was as luminous as the moon and sometimes he couldn't take his eyes off of her.

One evening, during her 31st week of pregnancy, they found themselves at the drink station in the dining hall at the same time.

"You doing ok?" he asked.

"Yeah, I'm good."

"Do you need anything?"

"Need anything?" she echoed. "Like what?" And then she grimaced, and the hand not holding her water glass went to her belly.

"Oh my god what is it, what's wrong?" he asked in alarm.

"I'm fine." She shook her head and opened her eyes. "It's just, she's kicking, and she's so high, she's like right up against my diaphragm, and it just pushes on everything. You know it's all…"she rubbed her hand over her belly," it's all packed so tight in there now."

"Oh. Does it hurt?"

"Kind of, sometimes. More uncomfortable than anything." She made the face again

"Did she do it again?"

"Yeah. Do you wanna feel?"

"Uh yeah, sure. Are...is this ok?" he asked as he held his hand out tentatively.

"I wouldn't have asked you if you wanted to feel if I wasn't willing to let you."

Cato nodded and placed his hand on Katniss's belly, scrunching his face up when he didn't feel anything.

"No it's more..." she put her hand over his and moved it to the side a little. "It's more here."

Cato gasped and jumped a little when he felt a twitch against his hand. "Oh my god, that's her!"

"Yeah." Katniss was smiling.

He felt the twitch against his palm again and couldn't keep himself from grinning. But then he realized something and his grin faded. "Why are her feet all the way up here?" he asked in alarm.

"Huh?"

"Why are they up here?" he repeated.

She smiled at him. "Because she's upside down."

"Upside _down_?!"

"Yes!" she laughed. "Babies are supposed to be upside down in the womb. They come out head first. You didn't know that?"

"No." He scowled. He felt dumb and his face was starting to grow warm.

She stopped laughing at him and her face softened as she looked at him. "Her head is here," she said gently, and moved his hand down to the underside of her bump.

"Here?" he asked, his mood improving immediately as he caressed the curve of Katniss's belly, imagining the crown of his daughter's head in his hand.

"Mmm-hmm."

When he looked back up at Katniss's face, he could tell his eyes were shining.

"What?" she asked.

"Nothing just...what you said after you told me she was a girl. That we created something this time."

"We created something this time," she echoed.

She put her hand over his on her belly, and then she held her glass out, and he tapped the rim of his against the rim of hers.

And she looked up at him.

And he looked down at her.

And together they partook in holy communion.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Let the Catoniss begin. We're not going to focus on the war hardly at all, so if you were expecting that and you're disappointed, I'm sorry (but not really). It's not that type of story. Instead, shit's gonna get downright fluffy.
> 
> Also, that bit about Katniss not looking directly at Cato but still seeing him like he's the sun...I borrowed that straight from Anna Karenina. Thanks Tolstoy, awesome metaphor btw.
> 
> Thanks for reading!


	9. Chapter 9

One week later she went into labor.

Cato was asleep when they banged on his door to tell him.

32 weeks. He panicked. "It's supposed to be 38!" he yelled.

"It's ok," a nurse reassured him when he reached the medical wing. "She'll be fine. It's not uncommon, and she won't be the first baby born at 32 weeks here. Not by a long shot."

He paced outside of the hallway, listening to them murmuring in her delivery room, wondering what they were saying. Every time someone exited or entered the room he wanted so badly to stop them and ask them what was going on and if everything was ok, but he didn't want to waylay them if they were doing something important. So he continued with his pacing.

 _Sit down_ everyone who passed by said to him. _Relax_. _Stop worrying_. _Eat something._

 _No_ he said. _No, no and no_.

"She's been in there for like eight hours," he complained to Haymitch, who had come to join him.

"Actually it's only been four," Haymitch corrected him. "Relax. Sit down."

"I'm gonna punch the next person who tells me to relax."

"It's gonna be a while," said a guy in scrubs ten minutes later as he exited the room on some errand to get god knew what. "Relax. Have a seat."

Haymitch managed to hold Cato back until the man was out of sight down the hallway, but barely. "What if he's getting something she needs? You don't want to interfere do you?"

It calmed him down immediately.

xxxxxxxxxx

The contractions weren't so bad. They weren't fun, of course, but the epidural helped a lot.

It was the pushing, the _endless_ _pushing_ , that was the worst part. It didn't really hurt too much, but it was exhausting, and the immense amount of pressure was disconcerting.

 _Push_ they said over and over again. _Push, push. A little harder if you can._

"I _AM_ FUCKING PUSHING! IF I PUSH ANY HARDER I'M GONNA SHIT ALL MY ORGANS OUT!" she roared.

xxxxxxxxxx

"Well there's an interesting visual," Haymitch said when they heard Katniss yelling about shitting her organs out from inside the delivery room. "Don't worry son, if she's pushing then that's probably a good sign, right?"

"Do you know anything about pregnancy or labor?" Cato asked.

"No."

"Then shut up."

xxxxxxxxxx

Just over six hours after they declared her to be officially in labor, Katniss delivered her.

She was tiny-about three and a half pounds-but she was perfect and they said she was in good health considering her early arrival.

Still, they only let Katniss have one brief glance at her, and then they whisked her away.

And in that brief glance, Katniss forgot all about the pain and exhaustion of the last handful of hours and melted like butter.

"She's so beautiful," she whispered, tears of joy running down her cheeks.

"Yes she is," her mother agreed, and smoothed the sweat-soaked strands of hair off her forehead.

xxxxxxxxxx

Cato rushed forward when they held his daughter out to him, but then he saw how tiny she was-she could fit in _one_ of his hands. And so he shrank back. "What if I drop her?" he asked, panicked.

"You won't," said the nurse. "Here. Sit down and put your arms like I have mine. Good."

And then they placed her in the crook of his arm, and as he took a good look at her for the first time, he realized just how much he hadn't known until now.

He had not known that elation and terror could twine themselves together and riot inside of him with such intensity that it was actually painful.

He had not known that it was possible to adore anything or anyone this much, or that "love at first sight" wasn't just a myth, or that a 3lb, 9oz baby girl could wrap a 6'2", 200lb man around her little finger in under a second.

He had not known that he was still capable of shedding tears.

But now he knew all of these things to be true.

And now he understood his place in the world, his purpose for living, his true identity.

He had been called a _tribute_ and a _victor_ and a _monster_ and a _revolutionary_ , but none of these labels mattered. None of them were important.

 _Father,_ he knew, was the most important title he would ever bear.

His purpose, they had told him since he was six, was to _kill_ and to _win._

But they were wrong. He knew that now. Because his purpose was to _protect_ and to _nurture_.

xxxxxxxxxx

They saw each other for the first time since their daughter's birth later that day.

They both noted the other's physical appearance. Exhausted (with matching sets of dark circles beneath their eyes, and Cato's hair an absolute mess from all of his nervous tugging), but glowing.

They grinned at each other like idiots.

But they did not touch.

"So names," she finally said. "Did you have any in mind?"

"No. Not really. I don't think I"m very good at names. Did you have any?"

"Well what do you think of Violet?"

He was surprised. It was not a name he would have thought Katniss would have chosen. It must have shown on his face, because "What?" she asked him. "What's wrong with Violet?"

"Nothing. I like it. I just didn't expect you to pick such a girly name."

There was that face. The one where she scrunched her eyebrows together to signal her annoyance. "I _am_ a girl you know. In spite of what everyone thinks, I'm actually pretty feminine in some ways."

"That's not what I meant. I wasn't trying to say...I…am just gonna shut up now. Let's go with Violet."

xxxxxxxxxx

They would have to keep her in the medical unit, they said, for about a month and a half. Until she weighed at least five pounds and could breastfeed.

They fell into a new routine.

Katniss usually spent late morning through early evening with her, holding her and washing her and pumping so much that she told her mother she felt like a cow.

She reveled in motherhood. It came naturally to her, and this, she knew, was what she had been born to do.

Before the games, she had said that she didn't want children. And at the time, she'd been telling the truth. Sort of. She had dreamed of having babies of her own for as long as she could remember. The longing was deep-seated and unshakeable.

But the harsh realities of life in 12 had gotten in the way, and she meant it when she said she wouldn't bring a child into this world.

But then she'd accidentally gotten pregnant, and she had found that the option of aborting the baby was, in fact, _not_ an option for her. And she was safe below ground in 13, and the revolution was almost over, the Capitol and 2 both solidly in the hands of the resistance, and Snow in hiding somewhere, and so she did not regret the birth of her daughter, and she would not have given her up for the world.

As for Cato, he woke at 6 every morning so he could have an hour with Violet before he went to breakfast. He spent his day teaching hand-to-hand combat as usual, and then he wolfed down his dinner and raced through his shower and returned to see his daughter for a few hours before he went to bed.

Katniss was usually there for the first half hour or so of his visit, and that was pretty much the only time they saw each other. They would stand on either side of her incubator as she slept inside of it and talk her over: how much she'd slept, how she'd eaten, if she'd been cranky or calm, the faces she made, what the doctor had said that day about her progress. And then, not wanting to infringe on his time with his daughter after she'd had so many hours with her, Katniss would leave the two of them alone together.

He would pick her up immediately and settle down in the armchair to hold her.

He marveled at her tiny fingers and her soft olive skin and the dark, downy hair on her head.

He smiled when she peered up at him with blue eyes like his, blinking slowly and studying his face intently. He wondered what she thought of him.

He delighted in every yawn and sneeze, and the way she furrowed her brow and huffed-just like Katniss-right before she erupted into annoyed or angry or hungry cries.

He would leave regretfully, his last words to her always "Sweet dreams baby girl, I'll see you in the morning."

And every night as he closed his eyes and surrendered to sleep his soul whispered _Violet_.

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The first time he heard Katniss sing to his daughter the world stopped turning on its axis and the force of it almost threw him backwards.

He had heard her sing once before, when he watched the footage of the little girl from 11 dying. But her voice had been shaky then and hardly more than a whisper.

Now it was clear and high and sweet and delicate and if it had been a color it would have been silver and if it had been a feeling it would have been like the first drink of cold water on a hot day.

And he understood exactly what Peeta Mellark had been talking about when he'd told that story about the braids and the Valley Song.

xxxxxxxxxx

The first time she saw Cato holding Violet, she was taken aback.

He held her out in front of him, one hand cupping her head, and he was gazing down at her tenderly and _cooing_. Something about her being his precious baby girl and about how she needed to eat as much as possible so she could grow big and strong and they could let her out of the medical wing and she could go home with her momma.

This was _not_ the same Cato who had wrapped his hands around her throat on top of the Cornucopia less than two years ago.

And yet this _was_ the same Cato who had wrapped his hands around her throat on top of the Cornucopia less than two years ago.

Her breath stilled itself in her lungs and her blood stilled itself in her veins and her heart stilled itself in her chest.

But between her legs, something stirred.

And for the first time, she felt desire for the father of her child.


	10. Chapter 10

Gale had been deployed to 2 a few months before Katniss gave birth to Violet, just as she was starting to show. The tension in the air between the two of them doubled after he found out she was pregnant, and they had hardly spoken in the weeks leading up to his departure. But just before he left, he had come to say goodbye, his voice and eyes full of repressed emotion. They held each other for a minute or so, their foreheads pressed together, tears in both of their eyes, and then he put his lips to hers three times before he turned and left.

Now he was back, and someone had directed him to little Violet's room in the medical wing.

Katniss gasped and threw her arms around him when he walked in the door.

"Can I hold her?" he asked after they'd spent some time catching up and filling each other in on the events of the last handful of months.

"Sure!" And she handed him her daughter.

He smiled down at her in his arms, but there was something sad about it. "She looks like you," he said wistfully. And then his smile faded and a scowl appeared in its place.

Katniss leaned over to see if Violet was hungry or needed a diaper change. But no. She had simply opened her blue eyes- _Cato's_ blue eyes-and was looking at Gale in confusion, as if to say _You're_ _not my father_.

And her heart broke. Because even though she wasn't _in love_ with Gale, she still _loved_ him, and she knew now, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that things could never go back to the way they had been between them before her first reaping. Their bond was irreparably broken. Another casualty of the games.

He lifted his head and put on a brave front. "So when this is all over," he said, handing Violet back to her, "which it looks like it will be in a few months, are you gonna move back to 12 with her? Victor's Village wasn't really damaged in the bombing, you know."

xxxxxxxxxx

The company of soldiers Cato had been training that day was pulled from him earlier than expected to be briefed on their upcoming mission, so he decided to go see Katniss and Violet for an hour or so before dinner. He was almost to Violet's room when a familiar voice wafted through the cracked door and out into the hallway and made him stop in his tracks.

"So when this is all over," Gale was saying, "which it looks like it will be in a few months, are you gonna move back to 12 with her? Victor's Village wasn't really damaged in the bombing, you know."

"Yeah," Katniss answered. "Well I'll keep her for the first year, and then after that I'm not sure. We haven't really discussed it."

"We?"

"Yeah. Me and Cato. I guess I figure she'll spend at least part of her time with him. Wherever he ends up. If it's 2, that would be a long way, so she'd probably take fewer trips and longer ones, but I doubt he'll go back there. He'll probably stay in 13, and if that's the case then he'll be able to see her pretty often." There was silence. And then…"What?" she asked.

"Why the _fuck_ would you let him _ever_ take her?"

"Because he's her _father_ , Gale," she bit out. "And he's good with her." It sounded like she was making an effort to stay calm.

"You're gonna let that rapist-"

"Don't call him that!" she erupted. "He's not a rapist and you know it!"

"Ok, fine, he's not a rapist. You're gonna let that murderer have a hand in raising her?!"

"He's no more of a murderer than me!"

" _What?!_ No. No. It's different with you."

"Is it really?"

"Yes! It's completely different! He's a Career! They're monsters!"

"I'm not so sure about that anymore. Maybe they're the ones that got it right. 1 and 2. If we'd all done what they do there would have been no Rues killed. No Prims reaped. I don't think anyone realized it, but in their own way, that was rebellion. To take control over who went in. To try to minimize the damage to their children and to the mothers and fathers and sisters and brothers."

"Are you fucking defending him?!" Gale spat out, his shock evident in his voice.

"I guess so, yeah."

"But after what he did to Peeta-how can you defend him? You can't possibly have forgiven him for that."

"I guess I have," she said slowly, as though her mind was realizing her words as fact for the first time. "Yeah...I do. I forgive him for Peeta. I'd be a hypocrite if I didn't."

"And what about what he did to you during your second games?" Gale demanded.

"We've been over this Gale," she said in exasperation. "There's nothing to forgive him for with that. He didn't do anything wrong. It wasn't even his idea. We had to convince him to do it."

It was obviously too much for Gale. "I don't even know who you are anymore!" he accused.

"You're right. I don't think that you do." But there was no anger in her tone. Only sadness at the truth in what he'd just said.

There was the sound of something slamming (a fist into a wall, maybe?), and instinct drove Cato to duck into an empty room just as Gale swung the door all the way open and stomped down the hall.

Cato bowed his head and let out a shaky breath. He felt as though an enormous weight had been lifted off of him and he wanted to cry with relief.

He hadn't realized that he needed someone, anyone, but especially _her_ , to forgive him for the things he'd done until she spoke the words.

He made his way quietly back out into the hall and over to the doorway to see Katniss sitting with her back to him, her shoulders shaking as she wept without making a sound.

He watched her for a few seconds, and then, feeling like a voyeur, he turned and slipped away.

xxxxxxxxxx

Violet was over five pounds and had started to nurse on her own, so she moved into a bassinet in the room that Katniss shared with her mother and sister.

Katniss had just brought her down to visit Cato half an hour later than they had agreed upon the day before. "Sorry," she said as she entered. "She was hungry and screaming and impatient. I figured the visit would be more enjoyable if she had a full tummy."

"Thanks," Cato laughed, and took her from Katniss's arms. "What's it like to be hungry?" he asked once his daughter was settled against his shoulder. "I mean _really_ hungry."

Katniss didn't say anything at first, and her gaze became distant and unfocused, as though she was reaching deep into her past. "It feels like your insides are trying to eat themselves. And you're lightheaded but you have a headache at the same time. Your muscles cramp up. And even the littlest gesture feels like a monumental effort. At some point you get in danger of just not caring anymore."

"But you remembered the stuff your dad taught you."

Her eyes snapped to his face. "How did you know about that?"

"Haymitch was telling Brutus about it on the tour. He said you almost starved to death but then you remembered the stuff your dad taught you."

"Peeta is why I remembered."

"What?"

"He saved my life. We'd never even spoken to each other." And then she told him about Seam kids and town kids and the day she'd rummaged through the trash out back of the Mellark bakery because she'd taken to boiling old mint leaves in water, and how Peeta burned the bread on purpose and took a beating for it and then threw it to her.

And how the next day, as they met each other's eyes, she glanced away, embarrassed, and her eyes fell on the dandelion. "And then I remembered that my father had taught me that dandelions were edible, and that there were all kinds of other plants I could gather, too. And that he'd started to teach me to hunt and he'd left a couple bows and some arrows hidden in the woods. So foraging led to hunting and fishing and, eventually, after I met Gale, to trapping too. So Peeta saved my life. And Prim's and my mom's."

"So it wasn't fake."

"What wasn't?"

"With you and Peeta. It wasn't fake."

She dropped her eyes, which were starting to tear up, and opened her mouth, then closed it again. "It was and it wasn't," she managed. "I can't...I don't know how to explain it." And she turned her face away so he wouldn't see her cry.

It was terribly awkward for a minute or two, as Cato, who understood how to comfort his daughter, but not her mother, averted his eyes and patted Violet's back.

And then Violet let out a rather unladylike belch and spit up all over his shoulder and he burst out laughing.

Katniss turned and scrubbed her hand across her cheeks, and when she saw what had happened, she started to giggle too.

So then everything was ok again and they didn't talk about Peeta Mellark anymore.

But that night Cato thought about him. A lot.

Five times-at least that he knew of-he had saved Katniss's life. Maybe more.

First, when he threw her the bread. And he took a beating for it.

Second, when he thought to come up with the whole star-crossed lovers thing, which eventually led to the rule change.

Third, when he convinced Cato and the other Careers to try to wait her out under the tree during their first games.

Fourth, when he took the stab- _Cato's stab-_ intended for her.

Fifth, when he hoisted her up onto the Cornucopia during the mutt attack.

And Cato had actually felt contempt for Peeta, when really, he was pretty much the reason that Katniss-and therefore Violet-was alive. He had been every bit as brave, every bit as tough as Cato, if not more so. But on his own terms, and not his district's.

 _He even saved me from myself_ , Cato thought. _From killing her._

It was a humbling realization.

 _I'm sorry_ he said silently to Peeta Mellark. _And thank you_. They seemed so inadequate, those words. They weren't enough. But Cato had never been good with words.

And then his thoughts turned to Katniss.

She was every bit as tough as him too. He could picture her at twelve years old, thirteen years old, fourteen years old, slipping off every morning to secure her family's food for the day before she went to school, becoming lean and tough and cold because she'd had no other choice. She'd had her own training for the games. Only hers had come from real life and made his time at the Academy look like some foolish imitation.

And he wondered what she would have been like if her father had never died. If then there would only have been the soft, warm side of her. The one she showed to her sister and her daughter and sometimes- _sometimes_ -to him as the father of her child. And not the hard, cold side that she presented most of the time. And he was sad that her father had died.

And he felt sorry for Katniss, who had experienced so many tragedies. Besides the death of her father, there was Prim's reaping and Peeta's death.

But the selfish part of him was glad that Effie Trinket had drawn Prim's name from the bowl and that Peeta had sacrificed his life for Katniss's. Because if neither of those things had happened, his daughter would not be alive.

xxxxxxxxxx

Haymitch came to see him two days later, his face grave.

"Sit down son. I need to tell you something."

Cato knew this couldn't be good, and his insides filled with dread.

"The war is officially over. We won." Haymitch said. "There's gonna be an announcement later today."

"That's a good thing."

"Yes, but there was one last...skirmish. In 2. The citizens rose up against our occupation yesterday."

"Brutus-"

"He's fine."

"My parents-"

"I'm sorry son."

There must be some mistake. "But Plutarch said he'd keep them safe." The gamemaker had deemed it too risky to try to smuggle Cato's parents out of 2. For one thing, almost all of the Peacekeepers in that particular district were loyal to the Capitol, and Plutarch had very few of his people there working undercover for the rebellion. For another thing, almost all of the citizens were loyalists-including Cato's parents, according to the few informants Plutarch _did_ have there.

In spite of their political leanings, Cato and Plutarch had been concerned that if Snow figured out that the quell was faked-or if he was just mad at Cato for "inadvertently" riling up the people-he would have the Hadleys arrested and tortured anyway for revenge.

But Plutarch had been a master of deception, and had managed to pretend to be on the President's side throughout the entire uprising and the war that followed immediately on its heels. Snow never suspected that the 75th games had been a facade, and Plutarch had also managed to convince him to abandon Cato and Katniss in the arena and focus all of his resources and energy on the riots in the districts. It had not been a difficult case to make, and Snow had simply assumed that Cato had killed Katniss and that Cato would either die in the arena from starvation or be plucked up by the rebels so they could torture and execute him for the rape of their beloved mascot.

It had worked out perfectly, but if Cato's parents suddenly went missing, it would have raised some red flags and made the President suspicious. So Plutarch finagled things so that the handful of high-ranking District 2 Peacekeepers sympathetic to the rebellion kept a detail on the Hadleys, ready to scoop them up and out of harm's way should Snow for some reason decide to mess with them.

"He did keep them safe," Haymitch said. "From Snow and the Capitol. But he couldn't keep them from joining in with the other people of 2 and attacking our forces. They were both shot to death."

Cato just stared at Haymitch in shock.

"If it's any comfort, they died quickly. They didn't suffer," the older man said.

Cato was silent for a minute as he processed it all. And then, all of a sudden, he was on his feet, shaking and angry. "How do you know they're not lying to me?" he demanded, his voice fierce and his feet pacing back and forth across his floor. "Maybe they're just saying that. Plutarch has lied before. This whole fucking war was started with a lie. Maybe he never kept my parents safe. Maybe Snow had them all along and tortured them."

"Whoa, whoa, easy there son." Haymitch said, rising and raising his hands, palms out, in front of him to try to placate Cato. "Brutus is on his way here. He identified the bodies for the authorities. He can tell you when he gets here. Or if that's not enough, Plutarch will have them flown here-or you flown there, whichever you prefer-so you can see for yourself."

Then Haymitch pulled his phone out of his pocket and opened up a text that Brutus had sent him. "Here," he said, handing it to Cato. It was a photo of his parents. Dead and lying beside each other in black plastic body bags, unzipped to show their faces, their skin pale, their lips blue. One gunshot wound in each of their foreheads. All of his fight left him and he had to sit down on the floor immediately to keep from fainting.

He hadn't know them well, but he had cared about them. They were his _parents_ , after all. He had felt enough love for them to let himself be pimped out to desperate Capitol housewives. But they were dead anyway now. And it was all his fault.

xxxxxxxxxx

He was sitting on the floor with his back against the wall and his head in his hands when she entered. Haymitch had come to get her. "Bring the baby," he said after he explained everything. "He needs to be cheered up."

"Cato," she said in an aching voice when she saw him. He didn't look up.

So she sat down beside him and waited.

"It's my fault," he finally said.

"No it's not. They made their own choice. They fought for what they believed in. It just happened to be different from what you believed in."

He laughed bitterly. "Thank you," he said. "For thinking so well of me. But do you really think I agreed to the whole quell plan because I gave a rat's ass about freeing the people of Panem? Because I didn't. I did it for selfish reasons. To get back at Snow and all these Capitol fucks. And so this is karma bitch slapping me across the face for it. I'm not good like you. I really am a monster."

"You're not a monster," she said, and she meant it. "I've seen you with your daughter. I've _seen_ you." She set Violet down and reached up and pried his hands from his head, and then she placed the baby in his arms. Violet immediately snuggled into her father's warmth, and Katniss felt his body relax just the teeniest bit beside hers. "Maybe you did it for selfish reasons, but look at all the good it's caused. Look at _her_. Look at your daughter. And all of these children who won't be reaped. And all of these people who won't be held down by their government anymore. Who won't have to endure starvation and violence anymore at the hands of Snow."

"It was all a lie. What I did in the arena."

"Well, and I lied too. Do you hate me for it?"

"No."

"Then logically you can't really hate yourself for it either."

His body relaxed a little more, but after a couple of minutes of silence he let out a snort. "I may as well have just told Snow to fuck himself when he told me I had to screw all those women. It didn't do my parents any good in the end. _I_ didn't do my parents any good in the end."

"Yes you did. If you'd said no to being whored out Snow would have had them tortured. You saved them from suffering."

"What do you think they thought of me?" he asked. "Of what I did to you during the quell?"

The question took her completely by surprise. She didn't know what to say. "I don't know. Are you worried that they thought badly of you because they didn't realize it was planned?"

"Yes. But I'm even more worried that they _didn't_ think badly of me. I'm worried that they were proud. They could never see past 2. They lived in a bubble. They were brainwashed. You should have heard the way they talked about people from outlying districts-the way _I_ used to talk about people from outlying districts. Like they were less than human. God. They were so proud of me when I got into the Academy. And after my first games. It's sick, the way I was raised." He fell silent and put his lips to Violet's hair.

Katniss didn't say anything. She just sat there beside him as he hugged his daughter.

And then after a few minutes she reached out and took the hand that was closest to her and she opened her mouth and she began to sing.

After a couple of songs, she thought of something else she wanted to tell him, so she stopped.

"Snow killed Finnick's parents. You know that right? And he killed off Johanna's family. And Haymitch's. Because all of them fell out of line at some point. So if you're really struggling with the guilt of all this, of your decision, talk to them. Even though it's not exactly the same, I know they'll be able to relate. They all feel some responsibility for the death of their loved ones. And I feel responsible for Peeta's death. And Rue's. Even though I didn't technically kill them."

She opened her mouth and sang a few notes, and then she stopped again.

"And I know you haven't spoken to Brutus since the tour, but I think...I mean you should do what you want, but maybe you should forgive him. You don't know why he made his decision to fall in line. You don't know what the alternative was. Plus, he's like family to you."

And then she started to sing again.

And as Cato turned to look at the mother of his child, he remembered what Brutus had said to him.

 _The other Victors. They're your family now son. They understand you better than anyone else. And you understand them. You just don't realize it yet_.

He closed his eyes and leaned his head back against the wall and he concentrated on the sound of her silver voice and the feel of her hand in his and the comforting smell, milky and powdery, of the baby in his arms.

Brutus was right, he decided. And Katniss was right too.

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Haymitch told her about 12 a couple of weeks later.

She was asking him if he thought they could go back any day now, since the war was officially over, and he frowned and eyed her so sadly that it made her heart freeze up in her chest.

"What?" she asked. "What is it?"

"They bombed 12 early on sweetheart."

"I know that Haymitch."

"Yes, but they didn't tell you the extent of it. There's not...there's not really a District 12 to speak of anymore." He winced as he waited for her reaction.

"Like…?"

"Like it was blown to smithereens."

"Well at least almost everyone got out." He winced again. "Haymitch. I said at least almost everyone got out. Right?"

"Yes. A lot of people got out. But a lot of them didn't."

"Like _how many_ of them didn't?"

"About a third."

"A third?!" She jumped up from her seat. "Why didn't anyone tell me?"

"Because you were pregnant and we didn't want to upset you and have something happen to the baby."

"I haven't been pregnant for _months_!"

"I know, but then you were so happy and we didn't want to rain on your parade and so we just kept putting it off and putting it off and…"

"I want to see it," she said, her voice shaking.

"Sweetheart…"

"I WANT TO SEE IT!"

So he pulled up the photos on his phone and showed her. Apart from Victor's Village, it was nothing but a pile of ashes and rubble. And skeletons.

"Who didn't make it out?"

"Sweetheart…"

"WHO DIDN'T MAKE IT OUT?!"

"Greasy Sae. And Darius. And Ripper. And Madge."

White. Everything went white. She felt nothing. She saw nothing. She heard nothing. There was no such thing as time. The world ceased to exist. There was nothing but white. Nothing but blankness.

And then somewhere off in the distance, she thought she heard a baby crying, and a familiar voice. A man's voice that she couldn't place a face or a name to. And she was mildly annoyed because something was shaking her. And then colors and shapes began to form in front of her eyes and compose themselves into the familiar surroundings of the room she shared with Prim and her mother. And the man's voice became louder and clearer, and his face, with its sharp angles and blue eyes, came into focus mere inches from hers.

"Katniss don't do this. DO NOT do this. DO NOT do to Violet and me what your mother did to you and Prim. Cry or scream or yell or break things," Cato said to her, his hands on her shoulders, his eyes on her face. "Do whatever you have to do. But don't check out on us."

His words snapped her out of her fog immediately, and sent her plummeting into grief and despair.

"But it's my fault!" she wailed. "It's all my fault! I never should have said yes to Plutarch!" And she opened her mouth to speak again, but a sob came out instead. And then another and another and another, and then she was weeping uncontrollably. Her guilt was eating her insides and stabbing her heart and stealing the breath from her lungs and she wished more than anything that she had simply died in her first games.

But then Cato's arms were around her and he was hauling her into his lap. "It's no more your fault than mine," he said into her hair, as he cradled her head against his chest. "And what choice did you have? You could have sat back and done nothing, and watched children starve-I know you know how awful that is, you almost starved to death yourself. It's just like you said to me a couple weeks ago. The games would have continued and little girls like Rue would have been reaped and killed and people would have been beaten and women raped by Peacekeepers and the oppression would have continued. So you made this choice instead. And maybe there were more deaths in the short-term. But not in the long-run. And they were quick. Their suffering wasn't drawn out. It wasn't ideal, but it was what you had to work with. And like you said about my parents. They made their own choices. So did the people in the districts. They were ready to rebel and fight back. You just provided them with an excuse."

"But I'm a liar," she whimpered, her voice pitiful and thick with tears. "I lied to the entire nation."

"We both did. And maybe we did the wrong thing, I don't know. But when all you have are two awful choices in front of you, you make the one with the consequences that seem the least horrible. And that's what you did. Don't you remember what you asked me? Do you hate me for what I did that last day in the quell? On the beach? For my part in the lie?"

"No," she whispered.

"Then you can't hate yourself for your part in it, even if you have regrets and guilt over it. You have to forgive yourself. Because at least you did it for the right reasons. You're not like me. I did it because I was pissed at Snow and the Capitol for whoring me out. And because I was pissed that being a Victor didn't turn out to be everything I thought it would be. I did it for revenge. And I did it to prove to myself that I wasn't a coward like Brutus who just went along with the system and let them make him their puppet. I did it for my own pride. You did it to free Panem. And because of it, our daughter will never be reaped. And she'll never starve."

She didn't think she'd ever heard him say so much-and so articulately-at once. He was incredibly persuasive, as persuasive as Peeta at his finest, and it calmed her down immensely, though she still continued to cry into his chest for a while. But eventually, she lifted her head and pushed her hair out of her face and wiped her nose and her eyes. "Did you know?" she asked. "About how bad the bombing was?"

"Yes," he said without hesitation, his eyes on hers. "But I assumed you knew too."

She nodded. "Where's Violet?"

"She's right here," Cato said, lifting her off of him and helping her to a standing position. Then he turned and retrieved Violet from her bassinet and placed her in Katniss's arms. "She's the main reason you have to forgive yourself. And if you start to check out again, you have to remember that. Because I would try to raise her on my own. But I don't know if I could. I don't know if I could do for her what you did for your sister."

"Yes you could. You'd be fine. And you wouldn't have to do it on your own. My mom and Prim would help."

"Still…promise me."

"I promise. I promise I won't check out."

He released a shaky breath. "Ok. Good. Because, you know, she came out of our lie. So it can't be all bad."

She wiped her nose on her sleeve again and looked up at him. "You're right," she nodded. "You're right."

And then there was a soft knock on the door and Prim poked her head in. "Are you ok?"

"Yeah. Or I'm better than I was at least. I don't know if I'm ok yet. But I will be."

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That night Katniss thought about Cato as she lay in bed, trying to fall asleep. About everything he had said.

_DO NOT do to Violet and me what your mother did to you and Prim._

_I know you know how awful that is, you almost starved to death yourself._

_But when all you have are two awful choices, you make the one with the consequences that seem the least horrible_.

It was unnerving, how well he understood her. How he'd known exactly what to say to snap her back into reality, and then what to say to comfort her.

But what really made her shiver was the way he referred to them as a unit.

When he had needed comforting, she'd referred to Violet as _your_ daughter.

But he had referred to her as _our_ daughter.

And he had implied that he needed her too. _DO NOT do to Violet and me what your mother did to you and Prim._

She had thought that her dreams that night would be terrible. That they would be filled with blood and flames and the ghosts of Greasy Sae and Darius and Ripper and Madge.

But she saw nothing but black, and she dreamed of nothing but the feel of Cato's strong arms around her. Of nothing but the feel of his chest, warm and solid, against her cheek. Of nothing but the sound of his voice, low and soothing, in her ear.

It was so vivid that she almost cried when she woke to find herself alone in her bed.


	11. Chapter 11

It was astonishing how quickly everything was progressing above ground in 13. The foundations of the infrastructure were there already from the days before the games, so it hadn't been too difficult to reestablish electricity and indoor plumbing and even cell phone service.

Panem's train system, after being shut down for a while due to the war, had started back up and they had built new rails in 13 to accommodate the almost constant inflow of finished goods and raw materials. At least two cargo trains came through every day, each with one car devoted to passengers. The schedule wasn't regular, and you had to be flexible with your departure and arrival times, but it was affordable and it got you where you wanted to go.

It had gotten out a couple months after the war that the whole quarter quell had been a setup and that all of the tributes (except Woof of course) had survived and that Cato Hadley hadn't actually raped Katniss Everdeen. There had been some grumbling and mild outrage at first, but for the most part, people were too focused on their newfound freedom and rebuilding their lives to really care for very long.

It didn't really affect Cato at all, since everyone in 13 had known the truth right from the beginning anyway, and that was where he intended to stay. He knew he could never go back to 2, and he didn't want to anyway. It was too closely tied to his past. Things had been a little awkward for Katniss in 12, he knew, but she told him that after a couple of months people had pretty much gotten over it.

For about a year and a half after the official end of the war, Cato continued to live in his room in the underground bunker, but in the spring of 78 ADD, he moved into the little stone house he had built for himself on the outskirts of the land that had been set aside for the construction of the new Capitol, which was now rapidly springing up.

He led an exhausting life. Punishing, really. He rose at daybreak and made himself a bowl of oatmeal and some eggs and then he packed himself a thermos of coffee and a simple lunch and walked a couple of miles to work and he threw himself wholeheartedly into his job.

It made him smile. He had come from the district known for masonry, but since he was six he had been considered "above labor" and meant for something "better."

And now, here he was in 13, a stonecutter in a workshop. All day long he hefted chunks of sandstone and limestone up onto his shoulders and hauled them to his table where he measured and cut and smoothed them into bricks to be used to build foundations and fireplaces for houses and facades for commercial and government buildings.

He pushed himself so that his muscles ached and sweat dripped from his brow, and about once a week some of the other guys convinced him to come out and have a beer or two with them, but most nights he was the last one to leave, the one who made sure all of the machines were shut down and cleaned, and the lights turned off and the doors locked.

Then he walked back home and took a shower and ate some bread and cheese and fruit and by the time he'd finished drying and putting away his dishes, he was so exhausted he could barely keep his eyes open, and he'd stumble into bed and fall asleep almost the second his head hit the pillow.

They all shook their heads at how hard he worked. The other stonecutters and the friends he'd made from his time training the rebels.

They didn't understand that he was just trying desperately to distract himself during his waking hours and exhaust himself so he could spend as much time as possible sleeping until he got to see his daughter again.

Three weekends a month for that first year and a half, he had gotten together with a group of plumbers and carpenters and electricians, and they had rotated among each others' plots of land, trading labor and working as a group until each had a finished house.

Now that they were done, he still hung out with some of them on the weekends. They'd go fishing or hiking and it was nice. They all knew who he was, but they treated him like just another guy. Not like Cato the Victor or Cato the Revolutionary.

It wasn't enough though. They made fine friends and neighbors, but his life didn't feel complete.

And he still had bad days and terrible nights, when he remembered the look in Thresh's sister's eyes or dreamed about the boy from 4 he'd killed in his first games. The worst was when he strangled Katniss to death in his sleep. He'd wake up shaking and nauseous, with the urge to shoot himself up with morphling or get the lighter from the kitchen and hold it to his arm. But instead, he would roll over and pick up his phone and scroll through his pictures of Violet. And eventually his breathing would slow and heart would relax in his chest.

The best part of his life was the one weekend a month when he traveled to 12, which was also rapidly rebuilding itself, to see his daughter. He slept at Haymitch's, and sometimes, he'd stay up late sipping whiskey with him and shooting the shit like Brutus used to, but he never got drunk, because it was Violet he was really there to see, and he would have been pissed at himself if he'd had to miss out on a morning with her due to a hangover.

Katniss would feed him his meals, but for the most part, she kept out of his and Violet's way on those weekends. He felt bad for hogging her, but Katniss waved her hand dismissively and said it gave her time to clean the house and get other chores done. Plus, she pointed out, she could hunt on those mornings without foisting her daughter off on Grandma or Aunt Prim.

But now it was midsummer, and Violet was almost two and a half, and he had lived in his house for a couple of months, so Katniss had asked him if he wanted to see Violet every other weekend, and if he wanted her to come to him instead. He had said _yes, of course_ , _are you kidding?_

And so he took every other Friday off to travel down to pick her up, and Katniss came to 13 on Sundays to take her back.

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The first time Katniss saw his house she smiled. She had come to pick Violet up from her first weekend at there, and she found it easily using the directions he had given her.

He had built it on one side of a wide gravel path, close to a few other houses. It was small and snug-looking on the outside, made up of irregularly shaped stones that he had carefully fitted together like a puzzle, and it had a dark green front door.

Out front was a little purple tricycle, with irridescent white streamers on the handlebars.

They didn't see her at first. The two of them were sitting cross legged on the grass and he was trying to teach her to blow bubbles, but she kept emitting quick, violent bursts of air that did nothing but result in her spit flying everywhere. And so he held the wand up to his mouth and patiently explained that she needed to blow soft and steady and he demonstrated and bubbles went flying everywhere and Violet squealed and clapped her hands and jumped up to chase them.

"Mommy! My bike!" she cried when she saw her mother, running over to her and grasping her by the hand and pointing.

"I see. It's lovely."

"In the shed?" the little girl asked, turning to her father.

"Yes, I'll put it in the shed," he promised as he stood.

"And the bubbles?"

"And the bubbles."

"It looks good," Katniss said. "I like the stones. How they're all irregular. Can I see the inside?"

"Sure. Just go in the back door. The front one's locked. I don't really use it."

It was a simple house, with rough pine floors and matching beams in the high ceilings and cream colored walls and lots of windows to let in the sunlight.

She entered into the mudroom, which held almost nothing. Just a washer and dryer and his work boots, covered in limestone dust.

The kitchen was practical, with no real sign of any personality, except for the piles of crayons and paper spread across the table. Katniss smiled as she sifted through the papers. Some of them were covered in scribbles, clearly the work of her daughter, and some of them held simple pictures of flowers and cats and dogs that Cato had obviously drawn.

"Do you want something to drink?" he asked, and she turned to see him opening the refrigerator. "I have milk and water. And apple juice for Violet."

"No thanks. Is that _all_ the food you have?" Katniss asked as she peeked into the fridge. In addition to the beverages he'd offered her, it held only bacon and eggs and cheese and jelly and butter.

"I have carrots and apples in here," he said defensively, pointing to the produce drawer. "And bread and peanut butter and oats in there." He pointed to one of the few cabinets. "And bananas." He pointed to the counter.

"You eat like a child," she said, wondering if he would remember that morning on the train during the tour.

He looked at her sheepishly and shrugged, and she could tell that he remembered. "I don't really know how to cook."

"I'm just teasing," she reassured him, and turned toward the hallway that led off the kitchen.

The bathroom was unremarkable, except for the little purple toothbrush that sat next to his big red one. The medicine cabinet held a few rolls of toilet paper and nothing else.

The next room she peeked in was empty, except for a few unopened boxes. "Storage room," he said from the end of the hallway. "I guess it could be a third bedroom." There was an affected offhandedness to the way he spoke those words, and Katniss snuck a curious peek at him, but his expression was neutral.

She glanced into the next room, which was clearly his, but turned away quickly. It felt weird, too intimate, really, to be looking at it. Still, she repressed a smile at the state of it. There was literally no furniture apart from a messy, unmade bed, with wrinkled white sheets and a gray blanket. His clothes lay in piles in the corners.

She grinned as she looked into the last door in the hallway.

"My room!" Violet cried, clapping with delight and taking hold of her mother's hand to drag her in and show everything off. Katniss stood in the middle of the room, her heart melting as she took it in. The little bed with a feather pillow and a stuffed penguin and a plush turquoise blanket. The thick, white, faux fur rug. The twinkle lights, pink and blue and green and yellow, strung around the window frame. A handful of children's books on the floor.

"You picked all this out?" she asked Cato.

"No, she did. We went shopping Friday night."

Katniss put her hands on her knees and leaned down to address her daughter. "Your bed looks so cozy!"

Violet giggled and nodded with enthusiasm, but Cato snorted affectionately. "She wouldn't know. She made it about two minutes in here both nights and then she insisted on coming in to stay with me."

"She'll grow out of it," Katniss said, standing upright and turning to face him. "The trick is to sit in here with her and read to her and rub her back until she falls asleep."

The last stop on the tour was the living room. "I don't really use this room," he said, when she saw that it contained only a couch and a big, cushy chair with a footstool. No coffee or end tables, no lamps, not even a tv. But there was a gorgeous stone fireplace that matched the exterior of the house.

The floor was completely bare. Come to think of it, the only rug in the entire house was in Violet's room. Katniss almost opened her mouth to say something about it, but clamped it shut again. His daughter was his number one priority. As soon as the fall set in he would realize that her little toes were cold and he would rush out and buy bathmats and rugs for the hallway and a thick carpet for the living room. Katniss knew it. There was no need to say anything. He would learn as he went, and for the most part, she decided, she wouldn't intervene.

Except for the medicine cabinet. She should probably do something about that soon.

 _Silly man_ she thought.

And she couldn't stop the tender smile that began to spread across her face or the tears that filled her eyes.

This was _not_ the same man who had wrapped his hands around her throat on top of the Cornucopia four years ago.

And yet this _was_ the same man who had wrapped his hands around her throat on top of the Cornucopia four years ago.

"What is it?" he asked stiffly behind her, and she realized that she'd just been standing there, staring at the fireplace for a couple of minutes.

"Nothing," she said, shaking her head and blinking back her tears. But when she turned around, he looked down at her with worry in his eyes.

"Do you think it's ok?" he asked. "For Violet? Is there something I should have done differently?"

"No, no," she rushed to reassure him. "It's perfect."

"Then-?"

"You're a wonderful father Cato," she whispered and before she could stop herself, she put her hand to his cheek.

He hitched his breath and tensed his body, and his eyes were wide on her face.

She immediately dropped her hand and turned toward the hallway, embarrassed at her sudden outburst of emotion. "Violet honey!" she called out to her daughter. "We need to get going or we're gonna miss our train."

"I comin' mommy!" Violet called back.

She stayed facing the hallway as she waited for her daughter because she didn't want him to see her hurriedly wiping her tears from her eyes.

An almost unbearable pressure had built up in her chest and it was screaming at her to relieve it by turning to this man and kissing him on the mouth.

But she didn't give in and she didn't turn around.

So she didn't see him clench his fists to keep from reaching out and pulling her into his arms.

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She was right about the rugs. Sometime around mid-September, they appeared all throughout the house, along with a little pair of fuzzy brown bear slippers.

And as the weeks and months passed, she noticed other new things. A moon-shaped nightlight next to Violet's bed. A little wooden sled after the first snowfall. Tins of cocoa and bags of marshmallows for hot chocolate.

And one day, a husky puppy named Beau.

Violet had been asking for a puppy for weeks, and Katniss, who felt Buttercup was more than enough, said no.

But Cato was an entirely different story. "Sucker," she teased him as the puppy sat with Violet on the rug in the living room, wagging his tail and licking her face as she squealed.

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One weekend she arrived to pick her daughter up a little earlier than usual, and she caught them at their Sunday morning brunch.

"Mommy!" Violet squealed from her booster seat, waving her fork in the air.

"Hi honey," Katniss said as she surveyed her daughter's plate. Bacon. Banana slices. Chocolate chip pancakes. And a glass of milk to wash it all down.

"I thought you couldn't cook," she said to Cato.

"Most things, no. But breakfast…" he said as he flipped another pancake. "Breakfast I can cook like it's nobody's business. You want some?" And he grinned at her boyishly.

"Yes," she said automatically, mesmerized by his smile. _Oh I want some alright_ she thought.

"How many?"

"How many what?"

He gave her a funny look and gestured at the skillet with his spatula. "Pancakes." _Duh_ his tone said.

"Oh. Two please."

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It was 1:17am and her phone was ringing. Why was her phone ringing?

Alarm set in when she saw that it was Cato.

"What's wrong?" she asked without bothering to say hello.

"She's sick." He sounded panicked.

"Sick? What kind of sick?"

"Her nose is running and she keeps grabbing her ear and she has a _fever_."

 _Oh jesus. That was all_? Katniss wanted to laugh at him, but she stopped herself.

"What's her temperature?" she asked calmly.

"100.3. I checked it four times."

 _Jesus_.

"Ok, well that's fine. Nothing to be alarmed about. Just keep checking every few hours. You don't need to worry about it unless it gets up to like 103. And make sure she drinks a lot. Don't worry about only letting her have one glass of juice a day. Let her have as much as she wants while she's sick. But still dilute it with water." And then she gave him instructions on which medicine to give her for her ear. "Call me if you need anything else," she finished.

He called her back about an hour later.

"I gave her medicine and juice and she seems better, but I can't get her to go back to sleep. She says you rock her and sing to her when she doesn't feel well. I'm rocking her but...maybe if you sing to her?"

"Sure," Katniss said. "Put the phone up to her ear?"

"You're on speakerphone."

"Oh." And she proceeded to sing a few simple, soothing lullabies. "Did it work?" she asked about ten minutes later. But he didn't answer. "Cato? Did it work?" Still nothing. "Cato?"

"Huh?" His voice was thick.

"Did it work?"

"Yeah, she's out. Thanks."

 _He fell asleep too_ she realized. And she smiled to herself, but only for a second. Because her throat closed up and her eyes filled with tears and she wished more than anything that she had been there to see Cato asleep with his daughter, her daughter, _their_ daughter in his arms.

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One Tuesday in January he called to tell her that the workshop had a big order that needed to be done by the end of the week so he wanted to work on Friday. "Would you mind bringing her this time and I'll return her on Sunday?" he asked. "I should be done by 4, and you can just bring her right to the shop instead of taking her all the way to my house."

So she and Violet arrived around lunchtime and the two of them wandered around the Capitol shops until 4.

He wasn't quite finished when they entered the workshop and he gave them a guilty smile.

"Like 20 more minutes, that's all I need. When does your train leave?" he asked Katniss.

"Not for another hour. I can sit with her in the front room."

"No I watch Daddy!" Violet protested.

He opened his mouth to say no, but then he looked around the room and down at the hammer and chisel in his hand.

"Ok," he relented. He pointed to the windowsill behind him. "But you sit right here with mommy and you don't go near any of those machines. Got it?"

Violet nodded her assent.

"It's safe," he reassured Katniss, but she wasn't concerned.

"I figured. Otherwise you wouldn't have allowed it. I trust you." And she settled in and pulled Violet onto her lap and as she watched him work, she studied his body, noting how it had changed over the last few years.

He would never be a small man. He would always be tall and broad-shouldered, but he no longer ate like a body-builder or followed a carefully planned workout like he had at the Academy, and so he had lost a bit of his bulk. His muscles had grown long and lean, as though they had uncoiled themselves and stretched out.

His face when she first met him had looked baby soft and smooth, and now it was a little rougher, a little scruffier.

His blue eyes, once icy and cold, had mellowed out and grown smoky and warm.

But it was his hands, with their calloused palms and scarred knuckles and ragged cuticles, that she watched the most. They were _so. fucking. sexy._

They were sexy when they measured and marked and cut and sanded a chunk of stone into a brick.

And they were sexy when they flipped chocolate chip pancakes.

And when they scratched Beau the husky behind the ears.

And when they smoothed _their_ daughter's hair out of her face.

They were sexy because they did not destroy anymore, but created.

Because they did not harm anymore, but healed.

Because they were not rough anymore, but gentle.

And Katniss wondered what they would feel like on her bare skin.

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The winter had been fairly mild, and so March was unseasonably warm, and one sunny Friday morning a few days after Violet's third birthday, Cato arrived in 12 earlier than usual.

"Look who's here already!" Katniss called to her daughter when he came through the door. "Let's hurry and get your bag packed."

"But the twaps!" Violet called back.

"Well, sweet pea, we'll postpone that until you get back, huh?"

Cato gave Katniss a questioning look. "Twaps?"

"Traps. We were just gonna go check the traps. But it's no problem. You two go. She can always come with me another time."

But little Violet stomped her foot and made that face, so much like her mother's, that Cato had come to love.

"No, the train doesn't leave until 1 so there's plenty of time for you two to go check them," he said hurriedly. "I'll go see what Haymitch is doing."

This elicited another stomp. "Why can't Daddy come too-oo-oo?!"

Katniss smiled and brushed her daughter's hair off her forehead. "Well, there's no reason he can't." She turned to Cato. "You can come if you want. But you'll probably be bored out of your mind."

"No I'll come. You want me to carry something?" he asked as she slung her bow and game bag over her shoulder.

"No. You'll probably end up carrying _her_ at some point."

It was a successful run. All but two of her traps and snares yielded up some small creature, and her game bag became so full that Cato reached out and took it from her shoulders.

"You didn't have to do that," she said. "I can handle it."

"I know you can," he said. "But I'm feeling like dead weight. Besides," he said, nodding his head towards Violet, who stood in front of her mother, arms above her head, proclaiming _Up mommy, up mommy_ over and over again, "our daughter wants you to pick her up."

 _Our daughter_. The words made her shiver. "No, you take her and I'll take the bag. Honey, why don't you let daddy hold you? He only gets to see you a couple times a month and I get you all the time."

Cato laughed. "She'll spend the entire train ride on my lap. You take her. Get your fix in now so you won't miss her too much over the weekend."

Katniss didn't protest anymore and hoisted Violet up. "Thank you."

Cato smiled, but he hadn't done it for her sake. He'd done it for his own. Because he had decided long ago that the sight of Katniss with Violet on her hip was the most beautiful thing he'd ever seen.

And here, on her own turf, the mother of his child was especially breathtaking, and as they made their way through the forest, he glanced at her appreciatively.

She was at home in the woods, he had noted that before they were ten yards into the trees. She was light and graceful and her feet were steady and she was radiant in a quiet, tranquil way. As Cato studied her, he realized that she actually looked _younger_ than when he'd first laid eyes on her. Motherhood and a few years of proper nutrition had made her a little softer, a little curvier, though she was still small and lean. Her gray eyes had lost their steeliness and become gentle and hazy and, at times, they could be incredibly sensual.

But right now, they were bright and mercurial, and all of her senses seemed to be heightened as she focused on a faint rustling in the undergrowth about twenty yards from them.

"Oh my god, is that a _turkey_?" she whispered, setting Violet down. "You usually don't start seeing them until like mid April. Be quiet and don't move." And she slowly drew out an arrow and nocked it in her bow, and then she shot the bird right through the neck.

"Well he must not have been the sharpest tool in the shed," she said as she lowered her bow and started off towards his limp body. "They're usually a lot harder to get. Come on."

"God, look at this guy," she said when they reached him. "He's got to be like eighteen pounds. Good thing I brought you along. Now I won't have to carry him all the way to the butcher myself. We'll have to bring Daddy with us more often huh sweet pea?" she asked, turning to Violet. "He's good luck."

And she looked up and gave him a big grin, all pearly teeth and shining eyes and glowing cheeks, and then knelt down to retrieve the arrow from the turkey's neck.

But Cato couldn't smile back because his throat suddenly hurt.

This was who she was supposed to be. This woman. Strong and proud and warm and resilient in spite of everything that life had thrown at her.

She really was on fire, only now she was soft and cozy and life-sustaining. Not raging and hungry and desperate. Not reduced to a pile of smoking ashes.

And he knew he couldn't contain her or hold onto her but maybe she'd just let him warm himself beside her for a while, maybe she could burn for _him_ sometimes. The ache in his throat spread down into his chest as he watched her, and he turned away abruptly, blinking hard and swallowing.

 _Thank god they tranqued me on top of that Cornucopia_ he thought as he listened to her explain the process of removing the arrow and draining the blood to their daughter. _Thank god they tranqued me_.

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She led them back toward town a roundabout way because Violet wanted to show him the meadow.

"Don't get too far ahead of us," Cato called as the toddler broke into a run towards the edge of the treeline. Katniss smiled at his overprotective nature.

"She's fine," she assured him, but he was already picking up his stride to catch up with his daughter. When he emerged into the clearing he stopped short at the sight that greeted him, losing his grip on the turkey carcass and letting it fall to the ground.

"Katniss?" he said, turning around as she picked her way lazily between the trees. "Have you forgiven yourself for Peeta yet?"

"What?"

"Have you forgiven yourself for Peeta?"

"I don't understand. Why are you asking this now?" But he just looked at her, waiting for her answer. "I don't know that I'll ever be able to," she whispered. "And I feel especially guilty because part of me is glad he died because...you know...if he hadn't...then Violet wouldn't…Cato why are you asking me this?" Her eyes were full of tears.

"I don't think he holds it against you. I think he wants you to forgive yourself."

"How do you-?"

And Cato reached out and took her hand and pulled her into the sunshine so that she could see the sea of bright yellow dandelions, rippling gently in the breeze, that had literally covered the expanse of the meadow, so that only a few specks of green grass showed through here and there.

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It was warm in 13 too, and Katniss lifted her face to the sun and closed her eyes as she ambled down the gravel path toward Cato's place two days later.

She could hear their voices coming from behind the house, and she peeked her head around the corner to find Cato perched on the back steps with Beau at his feet and a mug of coffee in his hand.

Her daughter was crouched on the grass below, carefully arranging a bouquet from stacks of yellow dandelions and wild purple violets spread out below her.

"D'you think mommy will like 'em?" she asked.

"I think she'll love them."

And then a sudden breeze sent Violet's fine, dark hair flying into her eyes. She made a frustrated sound and swiped impatiently at her face with her free hand. Cato laughed and set down his mug.

"Come here baby girl," he said. "I'll put it up for you." She set the flowers down and came to sit between his knees, and he pulled the elastic from her wrist and put it in his mouth. He gathered her hair in his hands and swiftly plaited it and secured it, and while it wasn't neat or pretty, it did the trick.

"Like mommy!" Violet cried with delight, turning around to face her father as she reached her hands back and ran them over her braid.

"Like mommy," he agreed, and kissed her nose. "Just like mommy."

As he pulled away a fly buzzed down between them and landed on her cheek. She furrowed her brow and huffed as she swatted at it, and Cato burst out laughing, covering his mouth with his hand.

"Oh now you _really_ look like your mother." His voice was so tender it hurt. As though he was proud of how much like Katniss Violet was. As though he _liked_ that she resembled her mother.

And all of a sudden Katniss wanted nothing more than to have him inside of her.

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"Mommy!" Violet squealed when she took a deep breath and rounded the corner five minutes later. "Look!" And she held out the flowers.

"Are those for me?" she gasped, her surprise fake, but her delight genuine. "They're beautiful! And so is your hair!" She knelt down and kissed Violet on the nose, precisely because Cato's lips had touched that very spot a few minutes ago.

"Come see what daddy got me for my birthday!"

In front of the shed was a little red wheelbarrow and a set of toy gardening tools. There was a shovel and a rake and a watering can, and even a little pair of work gloves. But the most adorable part was the straw sunhat with a purple ribbon around the crown and the pair of green galoshes, with frog faces on the toes.

"Oh my god you're gonna look so cute in this," she said. "What a good birthday, huh? Did you get everything you wanted?"

"No," Violet said. Not sadly or angrily. But simply and honestly.

"No?" Cato said from behind them. "Well this is unacceptable. Tell me what it is you want and I'll get it for you."

"God you spoil her," Katniss laughed, rolling her eyes.

"Promise Daddy? Promise?"

"I promise," he said, crouching down to put his arms around her. "As long as I can afford it and and mommy says it's ok for you to have. Now tell me what it is. And don't say a pony. Because I can't afford one of those."

"Silly Daddy! Not a pony!"

"Then what?"

She giggled and stomped her feet and her hands clutched at his shoulders. "A baby brother!"

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**Ohhhhhh shiiiiiit. Get ready for something with a hint of lemon (just tart, mind you, not sour) in the next chapter ;)**


	12. Chapter 12

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I make no apologies for how sugary this is gonna get. None. It just may put your teeth on edge. Or maybe it won't. I don't know.

Neither of them moved for a few seconds. Cato just knelt there, staring at his daughter.

 _Oh shit shit shit what the fuck do I say?_ Katniss wondered, but Cato recovered first.

"Tell you what baby girl," he finally said, patting Violet gently on the back a couple times with one hand and pointing to the house with the other, "go inside and get your bag packed up. Your mom and I have to discuss it."

"Ok!" she said blithely. And she turned and skipped through the yard and up the steps and disappeared into the house. Katniss and Cato both followed her with their eyes.

Katniss had recovered herself at this point, and had decided that a humorous course was the best one. "That sounds like an expensive present," she teased, though her voice shook. "Can you afford it?"

He stood up from his crouch slowly, and he didn't smile back at her. There wasn't even a hint of mirth in his expression. "Yes." His voice was dead serious. "So now I just need you to tell me if it's ok for her to have one."

Her heart was starting to pound painfully in her chest. She thought maybe he was trying to say...maybe...she wasn't quite sure...but...maybe...She had to be sure. "Well," she said slowly, backing up a step at the intensity of his eyes on hers. "I mean I guess it's your business. It's not really my call if you decide to find someone to-"

"She didn't ask for a half brother," he interrupted, quietly but firmly. He was looking at her, as he had so many times before, the way a predator looks at its prey. Steadily. With a single-minded focus. Unmoving. Every muscle poised and ready to spring.

This time it didn't scare her.

This time it made her wet.

"This isn't something to joke about Cato," she said.

"I'm not laughing Katniss."

That made her wetter.

"I'm telling you that I want to have another child with you," he continued, still unmoving. "But I won't push it. I said it once. I won't make you any more uncomfortable than you already are by saying it again. The ball's in your court. Do what you want with it."

God she was _soaking_. But still...

"And if I say no?" she asked. "How long will you wait?"

"Wait?"

"Yeah. Until you find another woman to give you one."

"I don't want another woman to give me one. I want you to give me one."

"Well that was...direct. I see subtlety isn't your game."

"I don't have a game. I know what I want."

Yeah, that was hot. She looked down at the grass between them. She hoped he couldn't see how badly she was shaking.

"You've thought about this before today."

"Yes," he confirmed.

"How long?"

"Since the day I first heard you sing to Violet."

Her eyes snapped back up to his face. "That was almost three years ago."

"It was. And I've thought about it every day since."

She rubbed her thighs together. Just a little bit. Just to relieve some of the tension that was building between them. He noticed. She could tell because his eyes dropped from her face to her thighs. But his expression remained the same. And he didn't move a muscle. Except he wet his lips with his tongue.

She looked back down at the grass

"If we're gonna do this then we would have to...you know."

"I know how babies are made Katniss."

 _God_ _the way he said her name._

"Have you thought about that every day for three years too?" she joked nervously.

He didn't laugh. He didn't smile. "No," he said. "I've thought about that every day since you poured me a drink in the train on our tour."

She didn't say anything for a few seconds. And then she lifted her head and met his eye.

"When do you want to try?" she asked.

He countered with a question of his own. "You in any hurry to go back to 12?"

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He had been direct and borderline predatory with her in the backyard. He knew that.

But now that they had gotten Violet down for the night (after what had to have been the longest, slowest, most awkward and nerve-wracking day of his life), they stood beside his bed like a pair of nervous teenagers, and he was trying to make her comfortable. He didn't want this to remind her of Violet's conception _at all_.

But Katniss was unsure of herself and having trouble getting started. "I haven't done this ever," she told him. "Except that one time. In the arena. With you."

"I figured as much."

"What is that supposed to mean?" she asked defensively.

"That I think you're the kind of woman who doesn't enter into this lightly," he said, which placated her immediately. "That you have to completely and totally trust and respect the man you do this with. That he has to earn his way to you and he should feel honored if you decide to let him in."

Well, now she was wet again. Honestly, he could be so sweet and simple and silver-tongued at times that she was beginning to think he had more in common with Peeta than she'd ever believed possible.

"Why didn't you say anything until today?" she asked him.

He shrugged and smiled down at her. "I wasn't sure how you felt about having another baby with me and I didn't want to make you uncomfortable. I wasn't planning on saying anything today either. But then Violet gave me a perfect opening. So I was like, fuck it, why not roll with it and see what happens? And by the way, I haven't done this since the arena either."

"That was more than three and a half years ago!" she said in disbelief.

"Yes, I know that. My dick knows it too."

It startled her into a laugh.

And then he closed the distance between them and he put a hand on her waist, his thumb rubbing circles lightly over her ribs.

She looked up at him.

And he looked down at her.

And he parted his lips just a _tiny tiny bit_.

And she'd never realized that such a subtle, unconscious movement could be so mesmerizing. She felt like she had to touch his mouth, so she lifted her fingers and laid them against it.

He closed his eyes and let out a soft sigh like a man granted a reprieve and then he opened his lids again, slowly, sleepily, and kissed the tips of her fingers. She trailed her hand across his mouth and over his jaw and down his neck, and then she drew his head down to hers.

And that was it.

They were soft and slow and gentle with each other, but there was no more caution, no more hesitation. Their mouths fit together perfectly, as though they'd been molded for one another, and they made up for all of the kisses they had ever bitten back and swallowed and choked on.

Their clothes came off slowly, piece by piece in between kisses and Katniss shivered as she felt, finally, for the first time, his calloused palms catching on her bare skin as he ran them down her sides and her shoulder blades and her back and her bottom.

She discovered that she liked the salty taste of the skin that covered his throat and the feel of his scruff against her temple and his biceps under her hands.

Eventually, he drew back and settled himself on his bed against the wall and he held out a hand to her. She took it and straddled him and he bent his knees and planted his feet so he could support her back with his thighs.

She looked down between their bodies shyly and he helped her onto him, watching her face as she adjusted to the feel of him inside of her. She placed her hands on his shoulders and when she began to move against him, he stayed perfectly still, learning her body as she learned it herself, until she did that thing where she furrowed her brow and huffed and gave him a look that said _move, you idiot_ and then she bucked sharply against him once and he laughed out loud. It reminded him of someone spurring on a stubborn horse. So he took her face in his hands and kissed her forehead and then her nose and then her mouth, and he placed his hands on her hips and he started to move with her slowly and tenderly, savoring each sensation. As though it was the last time he would ever do this with her. Because, for all he knew, it could be.

When she instinctively clenched her muscles around him he let out a strangled groan and she stopped moving. Her eyes were wide with innocent pride and wonder that she had elicited such a reaction from him. And then the look turned devilish, and she clenched again. This time the little brat knew exactly what she was doing, and as he seized up and groaned again, he thought _oh two can play this game._ He reached down between their bodies and put his fingers on her and now she was the one who let out an involuntary cry.

When he did it again he felt her melt into total surrender beneath his hands, and he decided to officially take over control.

He brought her to the brink and then stopped, brought her to the brink and then stopped, brought her to the brink and then stopped, until, with tears of frustration in her eyes, she curled her hands into fists and thumped them against his chest.

But he wasn't doing this to be cruel or to tease. He was doing this because if it was the only time he would get to do this for her, he wanted her orgasm to be as intense and exquisite as possible. He wanted it to represent the depth and the enormity of what he felt for her.

He caught her wrists in his hands and she dropped her head onto his shoulder so that he could feel her tears on his skin. "Trust me," he whispered, his lips on her temple. "Do you trust me?" She nodded against him, and he released her wrists and returned his fingers to her.

Three more times he brought her to the brink and then stopped, until, finally, when her body was shaking uncontrollably against his and she didn't even have the strength to whimper pitifully anymore, he followed through.

Every muscle in her body tensed as she went completely still for a few seconds, and then she arched up off of him, almost violently, as her orgasm ripped one long, hoarse cry from her throat.

She went completely limp and fell forward against him, her face buried in his neck. He put his arms around her and held her to him, running the fingers of one hand through her hair as she sighed with relief into his skin, her body still jerking now and then with aftershocks, tears still running down her cheeks and onto his neck.

When her breath slowed a few minutes later, she let out another sigh and pushed herself up off of his chest and he took her face in his hands again so he could kiss the tears from her eyes.

When he dropped his hands, she shifted her weight onto her knees on either side of himon the mattress and slowly began to move up and down, wrapping her arms around his shoulders, holding him close.

The feel of it made him freeze up for a second, and then he wrapped his arms around her waist and moved with her. He couldn't keep himself from gasping and he squeezed his eyes shut tight and leaned into her shoulder, thumping his forehead against it gently in frustration just as she had thumped her fists against his chest. He felt like he was being tortured and yet granted relief at the same time. "Nnng-gheh-heh,' he breathed into her skin, and he twisted his head this way and that, grinding his face into her collarbone as they moved together until he jerked up off of the wall and, tightening his arms around her, emptied himself into her with a yelp.

He leaned back against the wall with a breathless _holy shit_ , and she preened, clearly proud of herself. It made him smile, and he raised a hand to her cheek affectionately as he watched her through half-lidded eyes.

"I gotta get off you and lay down," she whispered. "Otherwise it'll all leak out."

"Ok," he whispered back, closing his eyes all the way and releasing her.

When he had regained his energy, he leaned down and retrieved his boxers. And then he left the bed and selected a t shirt and another pair of boxers from the corner of his room and handed them to her. "In case Violet wakes up before us and comes in," he explained, sighing regretfully as Katniss sat up and dressed herself. He prayed this wasn't the last time he'd see her naked body.

He shut off the light and they settled beside each other on their stomachs, faces turned inward toward one another.

"How long til you know if it worked or not?" he asked.

"About a week and a half. I'll take the test the night before you come to pick her up next." She yawned, and closed her eyes, and within a couple of minutes, she was asleep.

Cato watched her for a bit in the light from the moon, and then he tucked an errant strand of hair behind her ear, covered the hand closest to him with his own, and surrendered to sleep himself.

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Katniss woke briefly just before sunrise to discover that at some point during the night, little Violet had left her bed and climbed in between them, worming her way under the blanket.

Instinctively, both she and Cato had placed a hand over their daughter in their sleep so that their fingers overlapped.

A feeling of contentment spread through her, warming her from the inside out in reverse of the way the soft gray blanket of his bed warmed her from the outside in, and she fell back to sleep with a smile on her lips.


	13. Chapter 13

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Giving credit where credit is due: We already know I don't own THG or the characters, but I wanted to explicitly mention that I flat out lifted the concept of Peeta as a representation of rebirth at the end of Mockingjay and applied it to Cato in this chapter.

"Well?" was the first word out of his mouth when she opened her front door two Fridays later.

"Hmm-mmm," she said, shaking her head. "It didn't take."

"Oh." He felt disappointed, but only for a second, and then he felt hopeful again. "Should we give it another shot?"he asked at exactly the same moment she said "Let's try again."

They burst out laughing.

He put his hands on her waist and she drew his head down to hers and he pushed her, gently, into her room, and this time he buried his face between her legs and made her come twice with his tongue before he entered her and made her come a third time.

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There had been a time when Cato had wondered why Katniss, after saying yes to Plutarch's plan, hadn't gone to Gale, who moved to 3 with Beetee after the war, to ask him to be her first. So she could get in a practice run of sorts.

He had never asked her about it because he knew it wasn't his business, and so he had never gotten an answer.

But over time, he had come to understand, without her saying a word, exactly why. The answer was so obvious.

She hadn't been ready to have sex with anyone. She'd simply agreed to it for the sake of the rebellion. So asking Gale to do it first wouldn't have made it somehow "more" her choice. She still would have been doing something she didn't really want to do before she was ready to do it. But twice. Once with Gale, once with Cato.

So that was why. That and it would have hurt Gale so badly, he knew.

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Two Fridays later, when she opened the front door, he looked at her, the question in his eyes.

She smiled softly and shook her head. "Didn't take."

"Oh. Should we-?"

"Yeah," she nodded. He put his hands on her waist and she drew his head down to hers and he pushed her, gently, into her room, and this time he put his weight on his forearms and held her head in his hands and looked into her eyes as he rocked into her.

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"I'm sorry about the tracker jackers," she said afterward, as he lay with his head on her chest.

"Seriously?" he asked, raising his head to look at her. "That was like a whole lifetime ago it feels like. And it's completely irrelevant to our lives now. I wasn't even the same person. And would you really _not_ have done that if you could go back? I was gonna kill you when you came down from that tree. I'm actually glad you did it."

"I know. And no, I still would have done it. But I'm still sorry. And I remember those stings," she shuddered. "God they hurt like hell."

"They did," he agreed, and pressed an open mouthed kiss to her shoulder. "I think" _kiss_ "you should make it up to me" _kiss_ "by having sex with me" _kiss_ "on Sunday" _kiss_ "when you come to get Violet."

She laughed and smacked him playfully on the shoulder and he grinned at her.

"How'd you get that 11?" he asked, resting his chin on her chest.

"You won't believe me."

"Just tell me."

"You know how the gamemakers all sat up in that box eating and drinking?"

"Yeah."

"Well I was the last one to go and they weren't paying any attention to me and it pissed me off. So I shot the apple out of the pig's mouth and into the wall."

"Are you fucking kidding me?"

"I told you you wouldn't believe me. Plutarch fell into the punch bowl he was so startled. And then I bowed and said 'Thank you for your consideration." Sarcastically, of course. Effie lost her shit when she found out."

He was laughing against her, a warm laugh, from his belly. "Thank god you dropped that bow, or I would have been dead for sure." And then he froze in horror, eyes wide as he realized what he'd just said.

But she wasn't angry. The past hurt, it was true, but there was no sense in dwelling on it. Peeta had told her that four weeks ago in the Meadow.

"I'm glad you aren't dead," she whispered, stroking Cato's cheek and kissing his forehead. He let out a sigh of relief and closed his eyes and pressed his lips to her breastbone. "I'm sorry for the arena too," she said. "The second one. I should have told you I'd never had sex before. I wasn't trying to lie, I just didn't think you would care one way or the other. God that's an awful thing to say," she said when she saw the pain on his face at the implication that she had simply assumed he was too cold to care about whether or not she was a virgin.

"No, it's ok," he said. "I didn't exactly give you a reason to think I would care one way or the other. And the truth is, not too long before that I _wouldn't_ have cared. I would have been like, fuck it, if she's agreed to it, then she's agreed to it, and who gives a shit if it hurts."

"Why did you care? I mean at that point. It seemed...early on...for us."

He picked up her hand and studied it, intertwining his fingers with hers. "Brutus said something to me on our tour. About how the other victors understood me and I understood them even if I didn't realize it yet. And I don't think I consciously acknowledged the truth of it until after Violet was born, but when you poured me that drink and said that thing about failing our district partners and then it turned out we had similar...coping mechanisms...I think somehow I knew you understood me and I understood you and...yeah. I cared about you. I just didn't realize it."

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He wanted her and Violet to come live with him in 13 more than anything. He had wanted it from the time the war had ended.

But he would not ask.

He had seen, vicariously through Gale Hawthorne, what happened when she was pushed for anything she didn't want and he was just grateful that she seemed so enthusiastic about having another baby with him.

They called her the Girl on Fire for a reason for chrissakes. And when she'd been nothing more than a pile of dying embers, Gale had been like a poker, trying to stir her up. And sometimes he'd gotten an angry spark or two out of her. But that wasn't how you rebuilt a fire.

You rebuilt a fire by giving it fuel to sustain it, and then backing off and letting it breathe. Motherhood was a source of fuel for Katniss. Cato had realized that after she had Violet. It made sense, considering the maternal love she bore for her sister.

So he hadn't been surprised that she'd wanted a second child just as much as he did. But he hadn't been sure if she would want it with _him_.

And she seemed content enough with life in 12, where she had her sister and Haymitch and the forest to hunt in, and even her mother, with whom she seemed to have grown closer.

So he hadn't said anything when she decided to return to her home district, determined to just let her breathe..

And he would have moved to 12 too. He would have willingly abandoned everything in 13 and gone to work in the coal mines, just so he could return home every evening to see her and Violet. But Katniss had not asked him and he would not intrude. He would not stifle her. He would not snuff out the very warmth that made her so desirable.

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Two Fridays later, she yanked the front door open before he'd even knocked. He looked at her, the question in his eyes.

She shook her head and her eyes were dark. "Didn't take," she said flatly.

"Oh…" he said, drawing back, not quite sure how to read her. Was she mad? Had he done something wrong that he wasn't aware of?

But she grasped the fabric of his shirt in her fists and kissed him hard, and then she tugged him inside and kicked the door shut, and she pushed him, none too gently, into her room before shoving him down on the bed. She yanked off his pants and she put her mouth on him and just when he thought he was going to have to reach down and pull her off of him so he wouldn't empty himself into her throat, she released him with an emphatic _pop_ of her lips and sunk herself onto him. And as she pinned his wrists down on either side of his head while she fucked him mercilessly, he realized that, uncharacteristically for her, she was wearing a dress and no underwear.

"What the hell was that?" he asked exactly three minutes and seventeen seconds later when she fell forward onto his chest.

"Sorry," she said sheepishly. "I've been thinking about that for like a week and a half. It was getting unbearable."

"Don't apologize, it was fucking hot. But...why didn't you just take care of it yourself?"

"I did. A lot. Every day. More than once. But it didn't help. I actually think it made it worse."

"Oh..well...shit."

"What?"

He pulsed inside of her once, to show her that his dick, which had softened a little, was now starting to grow hard again at the thought of her touching herself.

"Oh."

"Yeah...so before it gets any worse, maybe you should-Ngha-ha," he temporarily lost his ability to speak when, with that devilish look in her eyes, she clenched around him deliberately.

"Be careful," he warned, his voice low and menacing. "I don't think you understand what you're asking for. This time could take a lot longer and you might feel….used up...afterwards."

She lifted her chin defiantly and looked down at him through narrowed eyes. "So use me up," she said and then she clenched again.

And before she could comprehend what was happening, she was laid out flat on her stomach and he was thrusting relentlessly into her.

Sixteen minutes, forty-two seconds and three orgasms (two for her, one for him) later, he went limp against her back. "Used up?" he whispered into her ear.

"Yes," she sighed dreamily, her eyes glazed over. "At least until Sunday."

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She had made the right decision to return to 12 right after the war. It was just familiar enough, just home-like enough, and yet different enough as it rebuilt itself, to strike a therapeutic balance for her.

But now she felt not quite _whole_. Now she found that she only felt complete when she was with both her daughter and Cato.

And she could ask him to move to 12 and he would pack himself up in a week. She knew that. That was how much he loved his daughter. But he had built that house. And he had friends up there, she knew. Friends he really liked and enjoyed. Friends he drank beer with and fished with and went hiking with. And he liked his job. He was happy because he was creating and rebuilding.

There were forests up there. He lived on the outskirts. A five minute walk would get her into the trees. They had rabbits and squirrels and wild turkeys and deer. And if she missed her mother and Prim and Haymitch, it was no big deal. They were just a couple of hours away by train.

There was only one thing that made her hesitate. She knew beyond a shadow of a doubt that she had fallen in love with him because he was hope and growth and healing and rebirth personified. But she didn't think that he felt the same way. He cared deeply for her as the mother of his child. He found her attractive. That much was clear. But she wanted him to love her for _her._ Simply. For who she was. It was a selfish feeling, and she knew it. She told herself this was no reason to keep his child from moving in with him and to suck it up and humble herself and ask him if he would be ok with her moving to 13.

But her pride. Her awful pride. It kept her from saying anything.

Until one Thursday night, as she was packing to leave the next day for Finnick and Annie's wedding in 4, she returned to her bathroom to check the results of the pregnancy test she'd just taken.

And then she knew that she was being selfish. And she decided that she would say something to him.

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Cato had arrived at the hotel in 4 late in the afternoon of that same Thursday. He didn't know Annie all that well, and he hadn't seen Finnick since the end of the war, but he now wholeheartedly subscribed to the philosophy of one big Victor family, and all of them had turned out for the wedding.

He dumped his luggage in the room he had gotten for himself and Katniss, who wouldn't arrive until the next evening, and headed to the lobby bar to see who else was there.

He was enjoying a glass of whiskey with Finnick and Haymitch and Gloss when Brutus entered. He hadn't seen his mentor since the end of the war either. Brutus, who had not taken part in the final skirmish in 2, had come to 13 briefly and the two had made amends to one another, but the older man had returned to his home district after a couple of weeks.

"Well," he said as Cato enveloped him in a bear hug. "How's the baby?"

"Not a baby anymore," Cato said. "She's walking and talking." And he pulled out his phone and proceeded to bore Brutus with picture after picture of his daughter and a long detailed explanation of what was going on in each one and why it was especially adorable.

"Oh, and this video of her," he said. "You have to watch it. Then you can get a drink, I swear."

It was an old one, before Violet had even turned 2, and it featured Katniss, eyes sparkling, holding the toddler on her lap as she sat in her kitchen.

"Is it on?" she asked. "Is it recording?"

"Yes," came his exasperated voice from behind the camera. "Now what is it? Why are you making me do this?"

"Show him what we practiced," Katniss cooed into Violet's ear. "Who is that?" she asked, pointing to the camera. "Who is that?"

Violet just giggled and stuck her fist in her mouth.

"Seriously?" Katniss said. "All morning long. All. Morning. Long. And now that he's finally here-"

"DADA!" Violet erupted. "DADA DADA DADA!"

The camera shook.

Katniss giggled. "Yes!" she cried her eyes on Cato. " _Who_ is that again?"

"DADA!"

"Oh my god!" came Cato's teary voice. "How-"

"We've been practicing," Katniss beamed. "She said 'Mama' for the first time last week, so every day I've been pointing to myself and saying 'Mommy,' and then I pull up a picture of you and say 'Daddy' and-"

But her words were cut off, and the video made it clear by the way it was suddenly pressed into the fabric of her shirt that Cato had thrown his arms around both his child and her mother at once, and there was a muffled, unintelligible sound coming from him, and then Katniss's soothing voice saying "It's ok, it's ok," as Violet continued to proclaim "DADA!" over and over again. And then the video ended.

Cato looked at him sheepishly and grinned. "I'm not usually so-"

"Girly?" Brutus asked.

"Overwhelmed," Cato corrected, punching his mentor in the shoulder.

Brutus studied him. "And you don't live with them?"

"Hmm-mmm."

"Why not?"

"We're...it's not like that with me and Katniss. I mean, I love Violet to death and I would love to be near her all the time, but…"

"She's absolutely in love with you."

"Well, she's a daddy's girl," Cato grinned.

"That's not who I was talking about," Brutus said. Cato stopped short. "Watch that video again. But pay attention to Katniss. Look at her eyes. Listen to her voice. Look at the way she looks at you. And what kind of single mother makes sure to even things out by teaching her child to say 'Daddy' as soon as they say 'Mama?'"

"No, you don't understand, she's never asked me to move in. She's never asked to come live with me."

"And have _you_ asked her to come live with you? Have _you_ asked her if you can move in with her?"

"No, but it's different. I don't want to impose."

"And maybe she doesn't either. Maybe she doesn't realize _you're_ in love with _he_ r too."

"Wh-I never said I was in love with her."

"But you are, aren't you?"

Cato just looked at his mentor in shock. "Yes," he finally admitted.

"See. It's like I said. I understand you. And her. But apparently there are some limits to just how well you two," he pointed back and forth between Cato and the phone, "understand each other. Now I'm gonna go get my goddamned drink."

And he left Cato standing there, his heart pounding so hard in his chest he thought it would explode.

xxxxxxxxxx

He was in the lobby again the next night when she approached the front desk to get her key.

He tried to catch her eye, but she didn't notice him.

He downed the rest of his drink. "I'm gonna go," he said to Brutus.

Brutus looked at him in disbelief. "It's not even 8:30."

"Yeah. I know."

"You only had one drink."

"Yeah. I know."

Brutus turned his head to see Katniss's back as she made her way down the hall, and then he smirked knowingly. "Aaaah, I get it."

"Shut up Brutus." Cato said, and ducked his head shyly. .

xxxxxxxxxx

When he opened the door to the room, she had just set her suitcase on the luggage rack.

He looked at her, the question in his eyes.

She gave him a small smile, her eyes alight, her cheeks aglow.

He wanted to shout with the joy of it, but he kept his mouth shut because he was afraid that if he opened it, his heart, which had leapt in his chest, would rise up into his throat and escape into the air before he could catch it.

So he grinned back at her instead, waiting for her to say it.

But she didn't speak a word.

She just looked at him with those shining eyes.

So he pretended to misunderstand.

He put his hands on her waist and she drew his head down to hers, and he pushed her, gently, onto the bed.

And afterward, as he lay with his head on her chest and his hand on her stomach, she whispered, "It took."

xxxxxxxxxx

The next morning, as they lay in bed, she decided it was time.

"That third bedroom," she said.

"Yeah?"

"Did you build that because you knew you wanted another baby?"

"Yeah."

"Aren't you...lonely there in that house? With three bedrooms and just you?"

He eyed her warily. "Yes."

"Do you want...do you want Violet and this," she pointed to her stomach, "whatever this turns out to be...to come live with you?"

His eyes took on a look of pain. "You know the answer to that Katniss."

She nodded. "Ok."

"Ok? Wh..ok what? What does that mean?"

"It means they can come live with you."

"What about you?" he asked slowly.

"Well, yeah, I was wondering if it would be ok if I…" She looked away from him. "If I…"

"If you came and lived with me too?" he finished.

"Yes," she sighed, grateful he'd said the words for her.

"Of course you can come live with me. Why the hell would I say no?"

"I figured you'd say it was ok," she said hurriedly. "Because it would mean you'd get to live with both of your children. I just didn't want to impose myself-"

" _Impose_ yourself?"

"Yeah, I mean I know how much you love Violet and I know how much you'll love this baby, but you know...as far as me...I didn't just want to like...I don't know...make you feel stuck with me."

" _Stuck_ with you?"

"Yeah."

"Why do you think I told you I only wanted you to be the mother of my child?"

"I dunno. Cuz it was about the right time for Violet to get a sibling and it didn't seem like you'd found a girl up there to be the mother and you knew I'd share custody and we already had a setup that was working out pretty well and-"

He sat up abruptly. "Stop. Just stop. I built my house next to the woods. I painted the front door green because I once heard Prim say it was your favorite color. I didn't decorate _anything_ except Violet's room. I didn't try to find another girl to be the mother of my child. I didn't even have sex with anyone else. Do you think I only care for you as the mother of my child?"

"No," she said hastily, sitting up too. "I know that you care about me on some level other than that. I mean, you know, what you said about how victors understand each other and you didn't want to hurt me during the quell and all that, but it's not...it doesn't mean that...that you love-" she broke off, her voice shaky, her eyes tearing up as she struggled with her vulnerability.

"I hated you at first," he said, and she jerked her head and blinked, taken aback at his words. "I wanted you dead. I wanted to take my sword and carve my name into you. But do you know what happened instead?" He lifted her hand and gently pushed three of her fingers to her palm, until only her first finger remained, and he pressed it to his chest, just a little to his left, and he spelled it out over his heart.

K

A

T

N

I

S

S

The sheer depth of _his_ vulnerability was too much for her and her tears began to fall before he'd reached the I, but he kept going.

When he was done, he flattened her palm against his chest and he reached out and took her chin in his other hand, swiping his thumb across her cheek to wipe away her tears. "That's what happened," he said. "And not because of Violet, although I love you even more because of her. And this little...bun in your oven," he said as he released her chin and caressed her abdomen."But because of your strength and your grit and your resilience and your warmth and your ability to recognize and fight for what's good."

Katniss let out a sob and covered her face with her free hand.

And because of your _incredible_ capacity to forgive," he choked out as his eyes started to fill with tears. He stopped himself, swallowing hard and swiping the back of the hand not holding hers to his heart across his eyes. "To forgive me for the things I did and said in that first arena and on our tour. To see me as more than just some fucking sociopath."

He lost it again briefly, but then with a shake of his shoulders he mastered himself and the words came pouring out. "Do you know that's why I am who I am now? Because you challenged me without even realizing you were doing it. I loved Violet more than life itself before she was ever even born, and I knew I wouldn't be a bad father but I didn't know that I could be a good one until you made it clear that you had faith in me and that you trusted me and that you _expected_ it of me when really _no one_ including me would have blamed you if you'd done the opposite. And I told myself I had to live up to it. I had to prove you right. And I don't know, maybe I would never have fallen in love with you if it weren't for Violet, but it doesn't fucking matter. Because I did and it's all tangled up now and I can't just...I can't just...I don't know even know what I'm trying to say anymore."

He dropped his head and shook it back and forth. And then he raised it again, and he pried her hand from her face and looked her in the eyes. "I'm in love with you," he said firmly. "For _you_. She's just what led me to you. She's what made me see all of the reasons you deserve to be loved." And then he took her in his arms and let her cry into his neck.

"Jesus christ Katniss," he finished unromantically. "I had _no_ idea you wanted to come live with me or I would have said something _months_ ago. God _years_ ago. Please don't hold shit back anymore and I won't either. Deal?"

She nodded against him and sniffled. "Deal," she whispered. And then she gathered her courage and swallowed her pride. Because he had made himself over for their daughter and for her and he deserved to hear it too. "I'm in love with you too," she said. "For you. And you're right. I don't know that I would have fallen in love with you if it hadn't been for her, but it doesn't matter."

And she drew his head down to hers.

And he pushed her gently back onto the bed.

And this time she whispered _I love you_ into his ear as he came.


	14. Epilogue

"Here you go baby girl," Cato said, and plopped a chocolate chip pancake on the toddler's plate, and then placed a sippy cup of milk next to it. She furrowed her brow at him and huffed, swiping the cup off of the high chair tray, frustrated that she couldn't have a _real_ glass like everyone else. He laughed. He would never say it out loud to anyone, but she was his favorite. She had olive skin and fine, straight dark hair and gray eyes. And that expression. God, that expression.

"Can you cut that up for her?" he asked Violet, gesturing to the pancake.

"Yep," his daughter said.

"Thanks." He turned back to the griddle to scoop out 12 more ladlefuls of pancake batter, and as he looked out at the backyard through the kitchen window, he noticed a chip in the dark green paint of the window frame.

It made him sad because it made him think of her.

She'd been gone for eleven months.

"Dad," his son Peeta said, "here." And he handed him a bag of chocolate chips.

He shook himself out of his melancholy and smiled as he took the bag. "Thanks." _It's ok_ he said to himself. _You'll see her soon_.

He looked down at the long kitchen counter in the second house he had built. The one they'd moved into when they'd outgrown the first one. It was an absolute mess. But he chuckled to himself. He wouldn't have to clean it up. That was part of the deal.

10 cups of flour

8 tablespoons of sugar

8 tablespoons of baking powder

2 teaspoons of salt

16 eggs

8 cups of milk

1 pound of butter

6 teaspoons vanilla extract

4 bags of chocolate chips

3 glass bottles of maple syrup

7 bunches of bananas

3 pounds of bacon

2 gallons of milk

2 gallons of orange juice

Ungodly amounts of coffee

That was how much food it took, on average, to feed them all breakfast on Sunday mornings.

His five children.

And their five partners.

And their fourteen children.

And their eleven partners.

And their five children, ranging in age from ten to T minus three weeks and counting.

Except all of a sudden, as he stood there studying his family, his grandson Logan's wife Ella placed a hand on her swollen belly, her eyes wide.

No one else seemed to have noticed, but Cato knew that look. He'd seen it on his wife's face. And the faces of his daughters and granddaughters. It was the look that signaled that _t minus three weeks and counting_ had just turned into _ready for liftoff_.

He let out a chuckle, and Ella glanced over at him. Their eyes met and the corners of her mouth turned up.

"Is it time?" He asked the question so softly there was no way she heard him above the din of chatter and laughter and silverware clattering and huskies whining as they begged for bacon.

But she read his lips and nodded. "Sorry about the cushion."

He shrugged. "Wouldn't be the first time."

They shared one more smile and then Ella turned to Logan and tugged on his sleeve.

xxxxxxxxxx

The next afternoon, he turned his face up towards the sun as he walked the half mile or so to Logan and Ella's house to meet his new great-grandson. His body ached-he was 81, after all-but his heart was strong and he made himself move everyday, afraid that if he sat down for too long, he wouldn't be able to get back up. And there was so much to do and so many people to see.

His best buddy Conor, who had worked with him for decades at the masonry workshop and had retired at the same time he had, lived a few houses down. He was sitting on his front porch with his wife and they were sipping iced tea. "Come have a glass!" he called as Cato passed.

"I can't. Ella had the baby last night!" he called back cheerfully. " A boy. Six pounds five ounces."

"Name?" Conor's wife called.

"Rohan!"

"Give them our congratulations!"

When he reached their house, which was bursting at the seams with family and friends, they immediately sat him in the easy chair. Each of his fourteen grandchildren had one at their place. "Grandpa's throne," they called it, and it was a given that whoever was sitting in it ceded it to him whenever he arrived.

"Here you go Grandpa," Logan said once he was settled and had taken a few sips of lemonade from the glass his great-granddaughter Avery brought him. And he placed little Rohan in Cato's arms.

By this point he was well aware that "love at first sight" was not a myth.

And that infants could wrap grown men around their little fingers in less than a second.

But his throat still closed up. And his eyes still filled with tears.

A collective _Awww_ went around the room.

"Oh he does it every time," Ella said to one of her sisters as he swiped his hand across his face. "It never gets old for him. Hundreds of thousands of diapers that man has changed."

"And gallons of breast milk have been regurgitated on his shoulders," Violet added.

"Gross Grandma!" That was Avery.

Cato looked at his oldest daughter, whose once-dark hair was now completely silver and whose face was almost as wrinkled as his, and thought back to that day so long ago when she'd spit up on his shoulder and saved him from that awkward moment as Katniss cried over Peeta Mellark.

And then he looked back down at baby Rohan. It was a little early to tell, but he thought maybe this one favored his mother in looks.

The infant opened his eyes and his mouth and let out a tiny mewl and then he blinked slowly. And the oldest and youngest members of the Hadley clan met each other's eyes for the first time.

"Hi little guy," Cato whispered. "Welcome to the world. I'm so glad to meet you. I'm sorry your great-grandma couldn't be here."

And he blinked back another wave of tears and lifted his eyes to survey his family, who had all gone back to whatever it was they'd been doing before he arrived.

"Look Katniss," he whispered. "Look at what we created."


End file.
